234 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



players were moved according to the throws of a number of marked 

 beans. Without the board and pieces, the mere throwing hazards 

 with the beans or lots, to bet on the winning throws, furnishes the 

 North American tribes with their favorite means of gambling, the 

 game of plum-stones, game of the bowl, etc. 



It is a curious inquiry what led people to the by no means obvious 

 idea of finding sport in placing stones or pieces on a diagram and mov- 

 ing them by rule. One hint as to how this may have come about is 

 found in the men at backgammon acting as though they were " count- 

 ers " counting up the throws. The word abax, or abacus, is used both 

 for the reckoning-board with its counters and the play-board with its 

 pieces, whence a plausible guess has been made that playing on the 

 ruled board came from a sportive use of the serious counting instru- 

 ment. The other hint is that board-games, from the rudest up to 

 chess, are so generally of the nature of Kriegspiel, or war-game, the 

 men marching on the field to unite their forces or capture their ene- 

 mies, that this notion of mimic war may have been the very key to their 

 invention. Still these guesses are far from sufficient, and the origin of 

 board-games is still among the anthropologist's unanswered riddles. 

 The simpler board-games of skill, that is, without lots or dice, and 

 played by successive moves or draws of the pieces, may be classed ac- 

 cordingly as games of draughts, this term including a number of dif- 

 ferent games, ancient and modern. 



The ancient Egyptians were eager draught-players ; but though 

 we have many pictures, and even the actual boards and men used, it 

 is not clear exactly how any of their games were played. Ingenuity 

 and good heavy erudition have been misspent by scholars in trying to 

 reconstruct ancient games without the necessary data, and I shall not 

 add here another guess as to the rules of the draughts with which 

 Penelope's suitors delighted their souls as they sat at the palace gates 

 on the hides of the oxen they had slaughtered ; nor will I discuss the 

 various theories as to what the " sacred line " was in the Greek game 

 of the " five lines," mentioned by Sophocles. It will be more to the 

 purpose to point out that games worth keeping up hardly die out, 

 so that among existing sports are probably represented, with more 

 or less variation, the best games of the ancients. On looking into the 

 mentions of the famous Greek draught-game of plinthion, or jiolis, it 

 appears that the numerous pieces, or " dogs," half of them of one 

 color and half of the other, were moved on the squares of the board, 

 the game being for two of the same color to get one of the other color 

 between them, and so take him. The attempt to reason out from this 

 the exact rules of the classic game has not answered. But on looking, 

 instead of arguing, I find that a game just fitting the description still 

 actually exists. The donkey-boys of Cairo play it in the dust with 

 " dogs," which are bits of stone and red brick, and the guides have 

 scratched its siga, or diagram, on the top of the great pyramid. If it 



