ANTHROPOLOGY. 1 



An Inquiry into the Origin of Games. — An examination of 

 the games of the Far East (Korea, China and Japan) and a compari- 

 son of them with certain games of the North American Indians us ex- 

 plained hy Mr. F. H. Gushing. has induced Mr. Culin (Korean Games, 

 with Notes on the Corresponding Games of China and Japan, by Stewart 

 Culin, Director of the Museum of Archeology and Paleontology of the 

 University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1895) to believe that the 

 true game in the American and Asiatic region referred to, is a trace- 

 able descendant of primitive religious divinatory formulae, reaching 

 back to a time in the process of human development, when man freshly 

 inspired by the phenomena of earth an sky, symbolized in his cere- 

 monies the directions of the four winds, and foretold fate or fortune 

 with arrows. 



Because American Indians divine by arrows, because archery, and 

 sets of arrows corresponding in number to Asiatic cosmic divisions, arrow 

 derived grave posts, and guild tallies notched and named like arrows, 

 still survive in Korea, and because arrow like rods are still used there 

 in divinatory formula? by fortune tellers, Mr. Culin has been led to 

 regard arrow divination as a primitive and original form of fortune 

 telling, and while the totemic arrow marks on short round gambling 



supposed to have been derived (traceably perhaps through an intermediate set 

 marked with colored ribbons) from arrow -iiat'iin.-nts such as were used by the 

 McCloud River Indians. 



sticks of northwest coast Indans are urged as indications of the arrow 

 ancestry of the latter, the same interesting suggestion is made as to the 

 cylindrical earthen stamps from Ecquador and the round and flat en- 

 graved cylinders from Babylonia. Twenty-three out of the ninety- 

 seven Korean games described (though in many cases the clue is not 

 1 This department is edited by Henry C. Mercer, University of Penna , Phila. 



