pachisi with cowries, and as chûpur 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 extreme throws, which in our own backgammon takes the form of allowing 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 understand." Still they saw enough of Montezuma's patolli to observe that it was in principle like their own game of tables, while 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 pachisi in some seaport of the East Indies, have taken his next voyage to the West Indies, and naturalized his newly-learned game on the mainland 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 effect, have taken independently 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 destroyed by elemental catastrophes? In spite of Humboldt we often
