THE HISTORY OF GAMES. 235 



was not there before, it would have come with Alexander to Alexan- 

 dria, and has seemingly gone on unchanged since. There is an account 

 of it in Lane's " Modern Egyptians," and any one interested in games 

 will find it worth trying with draughts on a cardboard square. One 

 kind of the Roman game of latrunculi was closely related to this, as 

 appears from such passages as Ovid's " cum medius gemino calculus 

 hoste perit," referring to the stone being taken between two enemies. 

 The poet mentions, a feAv lines further on, the little table with its three 

 stones, where the game is " continuasse suos," to get your men in a 

 line, which is, of course, our own childish game of tit-tat-to. This case 

 of the permanence of an ancient game was long ago recognized by 

 Hyde in his treatise, " De Ludis Orientalibus." It is the simplest 

 form of the group known to us as mill, merelles, morris, played by 

 children all the way across from Shetland to Singapore. Among the 

 varieties of draught-games played in the world, one of the most elabo- 

 rate is the Chinese wei-chi, or game of circumvention, the honored 

 pastime of the learned classes. Here one object is to take your en- 

 emy by surrounding him with four of your own men, so as to make 

 what is called an " eye," which looks as though the game belonged 

 historically to the same group as the simpler classic draughts, where the 

 man is taken between two adversaries. In modern Europe the older 

 games of this class have been superseded by one on a different prin- 

 ciple. The history of what we now call draughts is disclosed by the 

 French dictionary, which shows how the men used to be called pions, 

 or pawns, till they reached the other side of the board, then becoming 

 ilames, or queens. Thus the modern game of draughts is recognized 

 as being, in fact, a low variety of chess, in which the pieces are all 

 pawns, turned into queens in chess-fashion when they gain the adver- 

 sary's line. The earliest plain accounts of the game are in Spanish 

 books of the middle ages, and the theory of its development through 

 the mediaeval chess problems will be found worked out by the best 

 authority on chess, Dr. A. van der Linde, in his "Geschichte des 

 Schachspiels." 



The group of games represented by the Hindoo tiger-and-cows, our 

 fox-and-geese, shows in a simple way the new situations that arise in 

 board-games when the men are no longer all alike, but have different 

 powers, or moves. Isidore of Seville (about a. d. 600) mentions, under 

 the name of latrunculi, a game played with pieces of which some were 

 common soldiers (ordinarii), marching step by step, while others were 

 wanderers (vagi). It seems clear that the notions of a kriegspiel, or 

 war-game, and of pieces with different powers moving on the checker- 

 board, were familiar in the civilized world at the time when, in the 

 eighth century or earlier, some inventive Hindoo may have given them 

 a more perfect organization by setting on the board two whole oppos- 

 ing armies, each complete in the four forces, foot, horse, elephants, and 

 chariots, from which an Indian army is called in Sanskrit chaturanga, 



