In almost all ages and all lands we find the dance for pleasure - the social dance - the most enjoyable, active way devised for meeting an old friend or making the acquaintance of a future wife. Most people are gregarious: they like to live in communities rather than alone. Thus the social dance plays its part in palace as well as at village square, is danced by the rich as well as the poor, by the savage and the city businessman.

Dance steps grow out of time and place, ever changing as man shapes environment to change his way of life. The steps we dance today are quite unlike the steps we use when running to catch a bus to work. But if we could trace their pattern back through the past we should most, likely find that they once formed the movements of a magic rite.

Few dances can be traced in this way. The clues are scattered. Often they seem unrelated to the dance. Who would connect the labyrinth of ancient Crete with the children's game of hopscotch and the far and older still performed in southern France? Yet the snake-like windings of the farandole of Provence-an ancient colony of Greece-closely resemble a journey to the middle of a labyrinth depicted on an ancient Greek coin. The labyrinth pattern once stood for the passage of a dead man to heaven, a passage fraught with danger from threatening evil powers. People who performed a funeral dance to the middle of a man-made labyrinth believed they helped the dead man on his way.

Though the reason' for it has long been forgotten, this ancient dance survives both in the "snail shell" into which the leader winds the dancers of a farandole and, indirectly, in the hops on numbered squares of hopscotch-a children's dance game with a goal.

The history of hopscotch is uncertain: some think it started as a Christian rite. Probably it was already old by the time Christ was born, for early Christians inherited pagan ceremonials. Hopscotch is but one of many children's games that hold the secret of an ancient rite.

Other dance steps began in other ways. Many grew not from magic but from work. The sailor's hornpipe, arms raised above the head, imitates the way a sailor would climb the rigging of a sailing ship. The Swedish weaving dancer includes an imitation of a weaver's shuttle as it runs between the threads of the loom.