But man is the only animal that gambols and jumps and skips after it has reached maturity.

Were we to meet an elderly bearded goat, springing about in the air and behaving, generally speaking, like a kid, we should say it had gone mad.

Yet we throng in our thousands to watch elderly ladies and gentlemen jumping about after a ball, twisting themselves into strange shapes, rushing, racing, falling over one another; and present them with silver-backed hair-brushes and gold-handled umbrellas as a reward to them for doing so.
Imagine some scientific inhabitant of one of the larger fixed stars examining us through a magnifying-glass as we examine ants.

Our amusements would puzzle him.

The ball of all sorts and sizes, from the marble to the pushball, would lead to endless scientific argument.
"What is it?
Why are these men and women always knocking it about, seizing it wherever and whenever they find it and worrying it ?" The observer from that fixed star would argue that the Ball must be some malignant creature of fiendish power, the great enemy of the human race.
Watching our cricket-fields, our tennis-courts, our golf links, he would conclude that a certain section of mankind had been told off to do battle with the "Ball" on behalf of mankind in general.
"As a rule," so he would report, "it is a superior class of insect to which this special duty has been assigned.