498 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



pacliisi with cowries, and as chftpur with stick-dice. As to the way of 

 scoring the throws, only one of the old writers says anything. This is 

 Diego Duran, an extract from whose MS. history I have obtained by 

 the courtesy of Mr. Oak, of the Bancroft Library at San Francisco. He 

 says, as to the holes in the beans which showed how many squares were 

 to be gained, that they were "if one, one, and if two, two, and if three, 

 three, but marking five they were ten, and if ten, twenty." Thus in 

 Mexico we just catch sight of the peculiar trick of scoring, everywhere 

 so characteristic of the game, namely, the advantage given to the ex- 

 treme throws, which in our own backgammon takes the form of allow- 

 ing doubles to count twice over. Unluckily, the thought had never 

 crossed the minds of these early Spanish historians of the New World 

 that their descriptions of the Aztec game would ever become evidence of 

 use in tracing the lines along which civilization spread over the earth. 

 Had they seen this they would have left us a perfect set of rules, not 

 such careless mentions of a game which plainly they " did not under- 

 stand." Still they saw enough of Montezuma's patolli to observe that 

 it was in principle like their own game of tables, w^hile clearly they had 

 never heard of the Indian pachisi, or they would have seen how much 

 closer its resemblance came to that. This touches a point in the history 

 of the game. How did the Mexicans get it ? The idea may have 

 already occurred to some readers of this essay. Could not perhaps some 

 stray Portuguese or Spaniard, having lately picked up the game of pa- 

 chisi in some seaport of the East Indies, have taken his next voyage to 

 the West Indies, and naturalized his newly-learned game on the main- 

 land of America ? But there is no room for a suggestion of this sort 

 when it is remembered that patolli was an established diversion in 

 Mexico at the time of the Spanish entry, which followed within three 

 years of the first landing of Grijalva in the gulf of Mexico, and indeed 

 within five-and-twenty years of Colon's first sight of Hispaniola. What 

 seems most likely is, that the game came direct from Asia to America, 

 reaching Mexico from the Pacific coast. 



That the remarkable civilization of Mexico as the Spaniards found it 

 was not entirely of native American growth, but had taken up ideas 

 from Asia, is no new opinion. Alexander von Humboldt argued years 

 ago that the Mexicans did and believed things which were at once so 

 fanciful and so like the fancies of Asiatics that there must have been 

 communication. Would two nations, he asks in eflfect, have taken in- 

 dependently to forming calendars of days and* years by repeating and 

 combining cycles of animals such as tiger, dog, ape, hare ; would they 

 have developed independently similar astrological fancies about these 

 signs governing the periods they began, and being influential each over 

 a particular limb or organ of men's bodies, would they, again, have 

 evolved separately out of their consciousness the myth of the world and 

 its inhabitants having at the end of several successive periods been de- 

 stroyed by elemental catastrophes ? In spite of Humboldt we often 



