CHESS AND PLAYING-CARDS. 815 



round, tossing each man a set of dolhisses in the air, and by the way they turn np he 

 will divine tlie fortune of the individual for the month that is to come.' 



In F. Ratzel's History of Mankind^ a picture is g^iven of the dice and 

 amulets of a Bainangwato magician in the Etlinographical Museum 

 at Muuicli (I, p. 85), and again (11, p. 35.5) of a Kaffir witch doctor's 

 apparatus (amulets, dice, etc.) similar to the preceding in the Museum 

 of the Berlin Mission. 



Fig. 131. 



IVORY COUNTER FOK GAME (?). 



Length, 5J inches. 

 Lybian(?), Egypt. 



Cat. No. E. S. 1119, Museum of Archaeology, University of Pennsylvania. 



Dr. A. Donaldson Smith informs me that he saw a game played with 

 staves throughout Somalilaud and by the Sheik Hussein tribe among 

 the Arusa Gallas. 



'Speaking of the natives of the Zambezi, the Livingstones (David and Charles 

 Livingstone, Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambezi, London, 1865, p. 51) say : 



The dice doctor or diviner is an important member of the community being, 

 consulted by Portuguese and natives alike. Part of his business is that of a detect- 

 ive, it being his duty to discover thieves. When goods are stolen he goes and looks 

 at the place, casts his dice, and waits for a few days, and then, for a consideration, 

 tells who is the thief. 



Referring to the Guinea negroes, Bosman (William Bosnian, A New and Accurate 

 Description of the Coast of Guinea, translated in Pinkerton's Voyages, London, 1814, 

 XVI, p. 399) says: 



The second w;iy of consulting their idols is by a sort of wild nuts, which they 

 pretend to take up by guess and let fall again, after which they tell them, and form 

 their predictions from the numbers falling even or odd. 



Specimens of pierced cowrie shells used in fortune-telling from the Liberian 

 exhibit at the Columbian Exposition are shown in iig. 134. These objects are now 

 in the I'hiladelphia Commercial Museum. 



The negroes of the French West Indies, according to Labat (Nouveau Voyage aux 

 Isles de I'Amerique, Paris, 1724, IV, p. 153), play a game with cowries. He says: The 

 game which they play in their country, and which they have also carried to the 

 islands, is a sort of game of dice. It is composed of four bougcs or shells, which are 

 used by them as money. They have a hole purposely made in the convex side, so 

 that they will stand as easily on one side as on the other. They shake them up in 

 their hand as one shakes dice and throw them on a table. If all the sides with 

 holes in them fall uppermost, or the opposite sides of two fall in the same manner 

 and two in the opposite way, the player wins; but if the number of the holes is odd, 

 he loses. 



In the Streets of Cairo at the Columbian Exposition was a family of Bishareen 

 Soudanese, living near Assoium, on the Nile, whose head was a dervish belonging to 

 a local order, who practiced soothsaying with cowries (Dr. Talcott Williams). This 

 man threw several cowrie shells, and made his jirediction from the manner in which 

 they fell. The cowrie shells correspond with the staves referred to by Bent, and 

 are possibly substitutes for staves, as the writer also infers may be the case with 

 similar shells in the Hindu game of Pac/ris/, No. 38. 



•Translated by A. J. Butler, London, 1896. 



