April 1, 1886.] 



♦ KNO^VLEDGE ♦ 



191 



I regard as a game which might be excellent for recreation 

 if it had not become essentially a gambling game, and fit 

 only, as actually played, for cowboys and their kind. But 

 whist is nearly perfect as n game of combined skill and cliance. 

 It is so good that it needs no sucli factitious excitement 

 as money stakes supply. Indeed, a company of true loveis 

 of this splendid game should be ashamed to play for money, 

 just as two chess-players (outside the trained company of 

 the professionals) would he ashamed to invite eacli other 

 to contend for a stake. The only excuse for setting some 

 small price on points at whist is that, where any of the 

 players are not real lovers of whist, nothing but such an 

 arrangement will keep them from spoiling the game by loose 

 play, by talking of their hands, by telling their partner 

 what they want him to do, and by running counter in other 

 ways alike to the laws and etiquette of the game. 



But whist, to have these good qualities, must be scientific 

 whist, not mere play. A man may play what he calls whist 

 for half a century and never know w^hat whist really is. I 

 played whist myself, evening after evening at home, and 

 at college, and again on long sea journeys, for some 

 thirty years — to wit, from the age of thirteen to that of 

 forty-three — without getting any more recreation from it 

 than the element of uncertainty without skill can supply. 

 I do not say I did not find some exercise for memory and 

 observation, or that occasionally, having learned from the 

 most obvious indications of the play that the last three or 

 four cards in each hand were so and so, I may not have 

 correctly played fi'om the position so reached. But this, 

 when it happened, was the merest accident. In nineteen 

 games out of twenty I was not playing whist at all. My 

 excuse was that I knew no better. I played to complete 

 the table, not for my own amusement. I had, indeed, con- 

 ceived so much of a distaste for the game that I did not 

 particulaily care to learn from books what had been done 

 in the way of combining skill v.-ith that element of chance 

 which, like all other card games, whi.st po.ssesses. 



Whist properly played, however, is the best of home 

 games. I reject the oft-quoted saying of Talleyrand in its 

 favour, only because he said too little. To the young man 

 who boasted that he played no whist Talleyrand replied : 

 " Alas, young man, what a sad old age you are preparing for 

 yourself ! " But whist is worth more than to be a mere 

 relaxation for old age. It is a game whose chief value lies 

 in the service, crede experto, which it does for the busiest 

 manhood. 



Without considering the defects of what may be called 

 family whist from a scientific point of view, it is obvious 

 that the game is one of almost pure chance. Each player 

 strives to make each good card in his hand as soon as he 

 gets the chance. If he has a short suit, he tries to play out 

 his cai'ds in it, that he may trump the suit as soon as 

 possible. His sole idea is to take advantage of the good 

 cards or good features which chance has given to his hand. 

 Of whist as thus played, the remark quoted by " Cavendish " 

 in his " Card Es.says " is sound — the game can be learned in 

 a few minutes. " If that is the game," .said a young man 

 to whom the way of playing whist had been explained, " I 

 can learn to play it as well as any one else in half an hour." 

 That is actually the case. No one ever learns to play ftimily 

 whist better, after years of practice, than he did after his 

 first fifteen or twenty hands — a tolerably good proof, if any 

 were needed, of the monotony of the game, and its unfitness 

 for the purpose of recreation . 



Of real whist, on the other hand, Deschapelles, the finest 

 player that ever lived (according to Clay, who was himself 

 one of the finest, and had played with the great French 

 master), said that years of practice are required even to 

 teach a man how difficult the game is. A man may acquire 



the theory of scientific whist, indeed, and fall into the way 

 of applying its principal rules systematicjilly, in a few months. 

 But years are required to make him a really fine player ; 

 and, even then, he finds that there remains room for im- 

 provement, until, after many years, he looks back on play 

 which had formerly satisfied him as really far from the 

 excellence he seems now to have acquired. Wherefore, while 

 he may now regard himself justly as a good plaj-er, he will 

 not — if he have noted the lesson from his past experience — 

 regard his play as perfect, knowing that after a few more 

 years he will recognise yet another advance. 



THE SEA-SERPENT. 



By Richard A. Proctor. 



HERE is an intere.sting article on the sea- 

 serpent in the Cornliill Magazine, bearing 

 clear internal evidence of having been 

 written by Mr. Grant Allen. In dealing 

 with the sea-serpent, Mr. Allen calls into 

 effective action a number of remarkable sea 

 creatures, large enough and ugly enough to 

 make the most hideous appearance when they condescend 

 to ascend to the sea surface. The rhizodon, of the Indian 

 and Pacific Oceans, a sharklike fish, is known to exceed 

 fifty feet, and is said to have even measured seventy feet. 

 The Challenger has dredged up from the Atlantic teeth of a 

 shai'k which must have been nearly a hundred feet long — 

 or rather, which must probably he so long as that, since it is 

 altogether unlikely to have become extinct in the compara- 

 tively short period which has elapsed since the ooze was 

 deposited in which the teeth were found. " Let us rest 

 satisfied," he says, " with our big cuttle-fish and huge 

 whales and monstrous sharks for the present ; and when- 

 ever anybody catches us an enaliosaurian or a zeuglodon, or 

 an immense marine snake, let us accept their new addition 

 to zoology with all acclamation. Meanwhile, let us urge on 

 all theorists, ' First catch your sea-serpent — then proceed to 

 classify him.' " 



The advice is, perhaps, not to the purpose. If anyone 

 were to suggest that an Alpine peak ought to be brought to 

 the sea level before geologists undertook to discuss its form- 

 ation, the opinion would probably be that mountain peaks 

 would remain for a rather long time unclassified. We are 

 not veiy likely to hear of the actual capture of any of the 

 great sea monsters which have been regarded hs sea-ser- 

 pents, any more than of those creatures, if such there are, 

 which are actually serpentine, or lizard-like, or otherwise 

 unlike shai'ks, whales, cuttle-fish, and the rest. 



We may, however, for the present probably dismiss the 

 zeuglodon theory of sea-serpents. ISIr. Sea.rles V. Wood 

 regards the sea-serpent as a creature like a whale, and be- 

 longing to the same group as certain extinct toothed wliales 

 belonging to the Eocene period (the beginning of the ter- 

 tiary era). These monsters ran to about fifty or sixty feet 

 in length, and had most destructive fangs. It has been 

 suggested that they were in reality a race in a state of 

 transition from the seal-like to the whale-like character. 

 They were originally land-dwellers, but had taken to the 

 habit of swimming, till at last they came to resemble fish in 

 outer form, though remaining warm-blooded air-breathers. 

 But the tlieory that sea-serpents are (some of them) enalio- 

 saurian is nearer to the evidence derived from their described 

 forms. If we are to believe in some as yet unclassified sea- 

 monstei's at all, it seems on the whole simpler to recognise 

 sea-serpents as enaliosaui'ian creatures (as they existed in 

 ancient seas, with long necks extending from comp.aratively 



