Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/515

Rh hear Mexican culture talked of as self-produced, with its bronze and gold work, its elaborate architecture and sculpture, its monastic and priestly institutions, its complicated religious rites and formulas. It was my fortune years ago to travel in Mexico and explore its wonderful ruins, and ever since I have held to the view that the higher art and life of the whole Central American district is most rationally accounted for by a carrying across of culture from Asia. Thus it is now a peculiar pleasure to me to supplement Humboldt's group of arguments with a new one which goes on all-fours with them. It may very well have been the same agency which transported to Mexico the art of bronze-making, the computation of time by periods of dogs and apes, the casting of nativities, and the playing of backgammon. What that agency was one can as yet do no more than guess, but too much stress must not be laid on it in speculating on the mass migrations of the American races. Such matters as arts or games are easily carried from country to country; nor can we treat as inaccessible to Asiatic influences the Pacific coast of North America, where disabled junks brought across by the ocean current are from time to time drifted ashore, now and then with their crews alive. The Asiatic communication to be traced in the culture of the Aztec nation may not have been very ancient or extensive; all we can argue is, that communication of some sort there was.

Now one thing leads to another, especially in ethnology. Curiously enough, by following up the traces of this trivial little game, we get an unexpected glimpse into the history of the ruder North American tribes. Having learned about patolli as played in old Mexico, let us take up the account of a Jesuit missionary. Father Joseph Ochs, who was in Spanish America in 1754-'68, and who is here writing about the tribes of Sonora and Chihuahua: "Instead of our cards they have slips of reed or bits of wood a thumb wide and near a span long, on which, as on a tally, different strokes are cut and stained black. These they hold fast in the hand, lift them up as high as they can, and let them drop on the ground. Whichever then has most strokes or eyes for him wins the stake. This game is as bad as the notorious hazard. They call it patole. As it is forbidden on pain of blows, they choose for it a place in the bush; but the clatter of these bits of wood has discovered me many a hidden gamester. To play more safely, they would spread a cloak or carpet so as not to be betrayed by the noise." Here, then, is found toward a thousand miles northwest of the city of Mexico, a game which may be described as patolli without the counters, and which still bears the Aztec name, in a district whose language is not Aztec, so that the proof of its having traveled from Mexico seems complete. The people, being less intellectual than the old Mexicans, have dropped the skillful part of the game and are content with the mere dicing. Nor, by the way, is this the only place where backgammon has so come down, for in Egypt they will lay aside the board and throw the táb-sticks for fun, those who throw four and six being proclaimed Sultan and Vizier,