132 Mr. E. B. Tylor March 14, 



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 Eig-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 Icuhos, which gave the 

 Greek geometers 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 super- 

 human intervention, which form the very mental atmosphere of the 

 soothsayer and the oracle-proi)het. 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 mathe- 

 matical theory of probabilities that has shown the folly of the 

 gamester's staking his fortune on his powers of divination. 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 calcula- 

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

 statistics which more and more regulates the arrangements of society. 

 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 into 

 sport should rise again as science, and man's failure to divine the 

 future should lead him to success in controlling it ? 



Already in the ancient world there appear mentions of games 

 where the throws of lots or dice, perhaps at first merely scored with 

 counters on a board, give the excitement of chance to a game which 

 is partly a draught-game, the player being allowed to judge with 



