2 3 2 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



book of mystic diagrams. When this combination of a number of 

 two-faced lots is used by gamblers, this perhaps represents the earlier 

 stage of gaming, which may have led up to the invention of dice, in 

 which the purpose of variety is so much more neatly and easily at- 

 tained. The first appearance of dice lies beyond the range of history, 

 for, though they have not been traced in the early periods in Egypt, 

 there is in the Rig- Veda the hymn which portrays the ancient Aryan 

 gambler stirred to frenzy by the fall of the dice. It is not clear 

 even which came first of the various objects that have served as 

 dice. 



In the classic world girls used the astragali or hucklebones as play- 

 things, tossing them up and catching them on the back of the hand ; 

 and to this day we may see groups of girls in England at this ancient 

 game, reminding us of the picture by Alexander of Athens, in the 

 Naples Museum, of the five goddesses at play. It was also noticed 

 that these bones fall in four ways, with the flat, concave, convex, or 

 sinuous side up, so that they form natural dice, and as such they have 

 been from ancient times gambled with accordingly. In India Nature 

 provides certain five-sided nuts that answer the purpose of dice. Of 

 course, when the sides are alike, they must be marked or numbered, 

 as with the four-sided stick-dice of India, and that which tends to 

 supersede all others, the six-sided Jcubos, which gave the Greek geome- 

 ters the name for the cube. Since the old Aryan period many a broken 

 gamester has cursed the hazard of the die. We moderns are apt to 

 look down with mere contempt at his folly. But we judge the ancient 

 gamester too harshly if we forget that his passion is mixed with those 

 thoughts of luck or fortune or superhuman intervention which form 

 the very mental atmosphere of the soothsayer and the oracle-prophet. 

 With devout prayer and sacrifice he would propitiate the deity who 

 should give him winning throws ; nor, indeed, in our own day have 

 such hopes and such appeals ceased among the uneducated. To the 

 educated it is the mathematical theory of probabilities that has shown 

 the folly of the gamester's staking his fortune on his powers of divina- 

 tion. But it must be borne in mind that this theory itself was, so to 

 speak, shaken out of the dice-box. When the gambling Chevalier de 

 Mere put the question to Pascal in how many throws he ought to get 

 double-sixes, and Pascal solving the problem started the mathematical 

 calculation of chances, this laid the foundation of the scientific system 

 of statistics which more and more regulates the arrangements of so- 

 ciety. Thus accurate method was applied to the insurance-table, 

 which enables a man to hedge against his ugliest risks, to eliminate 

 his chances of fire and death by betting that he shall have a new roof 

 over his head and a provision for his widow. Of all the wonderful 

 turns of the human mind in the course of culture, scarce any is more 

 striking than this history of lots and dice. Who, in the middle ages, 

 could have guessed what would be its next outcome that magic sunk 



