ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at some of the toys which have a long history: those which must have a very fundamental potency, because they recur and persist, in different disguises to suit the time and the place, wherever toys have been made for children. Play as a concept has all the ambiguity of the very familiar. Like child-rearing, it is something in which everyone is an expert by virtue of close acquaintance. Although mechanical toys have a long history, they do not belong to the history of childhood until comparatively when, with the industrial revolution, man's mastery over and enthusiasm for all things mechanical spilled over into children's playthings. Some long-lived toys have traditionally been played with only at certain seasons of the year, and are in that sense alone ephemeral: tops in the early spring, skipping ropes to follow them, marbles at the beginning of the school year and of course conkers as they ripen and fall.
