By the unanimous consent of all nations, chess holds the first place among social amusements. The history of this game has exercised many able pens. According to Sir William Jones, it is decidedly of Hindoo invention. "If," says he, in a learned memoir on this subject inserted in the second volume of the Asiatic Researches, "evidence were required to prove this fact, we may be satisfied with the testimony of the Persians, who, though as much inclined as other nations to appropriate the ingenious inventions of a foreign people, unanimously agree that the game was imported from the west of India in the sixth century of our era. It seems to have been immemorially known in Hindoostan by the name of Cheturanga, the four angas, or members of an army, which are elephants, horses, chariots, and foot-soldiers; and in this sense, the word is frequently used by epic poets in their description of real armies. By a natural corruption of the pure Sanscrit word, it was changed by the old Persians into chetrang; but the Arabs, who soon after took possession of their country, had neither the initial nor the final letter of that word in their alphabet, and consequently altered it farther into shetranj, which presently found its way into the modern Persian, and at length into the dialects of India, where the true derivation of the name is known only to the learned. Thus has a very significant word in the sacred language of the Brahmins been transformed by successive changes into axedrez, scacchi, echecs, chess, and by a whimsical concurrence of circumstances given birth to the English word check, and even a name to the exchequer of Great Britain."
Of the origin of this game various accounts are given. Some Hindoo legends relate, that it was invented by the wife of Ravanen, king of Lanca, or Ceylon, to amuse her husband with an image of war, when Rama, in the second age of the world, was besieging his capital. The high degree of civilization which the court of Ravanen had attained at so remote a period is worthy of notice. An ancient Hindoo painting represents his capital regularly fortified with embattled towers. He there defended himself with equal skill and valour, whence he and his subjects were denominated magicians and giants. Ravanen seems to have been the Archimedes of Lanca; and his science must have appeared supernatural to the invader, Rama, and his wild horde of mountaineers, who were termed in derision satyrs or apes, whence the fable of the divine Hanooman.
According to another account, the occasion of this invention was as follows:—Behub, a young and dissolute Indian prince, oppressed his people in the most cruel manner. Nassir, a Brahmin, deeply afflicted by his excesses, and the lamentations of his subjects, undertook to recal the tyrant to reason. With this view he invented a game, in which the king, impotent by himself, is protected only by his subjects, even of the lowest class, and frequently ruined by the loss of a single individual.
The fame of this extraordinary invention reached the throne, and the king summoned the Brahmin to teach him the game, as a new amusement. The virtuous Brahmin availed himself of this opportunity to instil into the mind of the young tyrant the principles of good government, and to awaken him to a sense of his duties. Struck by the truths which he inculcated, the prince conceived an esteem for the inventor of the new game, and assured him of his willingness to confer a liberal remuneration, if he would mention his own terms. Nassir demanded as many grains of wheat as would arise from allowing one for the first square, two for the second, four for the third, and so on, doubling for each square of the sixty-four on the chessboard. The king, piqued at the apparently trivial value of the demand, desired him somewhat angrily to ask a gift more worthy of a monarch to bestow. When, however, Nassir adhered to his first request, he ordered the required quantity of corn to be delivered to him. On calculating its amount, the superintendents of the public granaries, to their utter astonishment, found the demand to be so enormous, that not Behub's kingdom only, but even all Hindoostan would have been inadequate to the discharge of it. The king now admired the Brahmin still more for the ingenuity of his request than for the invention, appointed him his prime-minister, and his kingdom was thenceforward prosperous and happy.
The claim of the Hindoos to the invention of chess has been disputed in favour of the Chinese; but as they admit that they were unacquainted with the game till 174 years before Christ, and the Hindoos unquestionably played it long before that time, the pretensions of the latter must naturally fall to the ground.
DISORDERS CURED BY FRIGHT.
Fabritius makes mention of a gentleman, with whom he was familiar, who, being unjustly suspected, was tortured upon the rack, and, when released, found himself quite cured of the gout, which was, before this violent remedy, rather troublesome. Again, we have instances of disorders being cured by fright. We find, in the Journal de Henri IV., that, "On Friday, June the 9th, 1606, as Henry IV. of France, and his Queen, were crossing the water in the ferry-boat of Neuilly, the Duke of Vendome being with them, they were all three in great danger of being drowned, especially the queen, who was obliged to drink a great deal more than was agreeable to her; and had not one of her footmen, and a gentleman called La Chatagnieraie, who caught hold of her hair, desperately thrown themselves into the water to pull her out, she would have inevitably lost her life. This accident cured the king of a violent toothache; and, after having escaped the danger, he diverted himself with it, saying he had never met with so good a remedy for that disorder before, and that they had ate too much salt meat at dinner, therefore they had a mind to make them drink after it."
THE WINGLESS BIRD OF NEW ZEALAND.
One of the chief wonders of the world of Ornithology is the Apteryx, a bird which is found only in New Zealand, and even there, is rapidly becoming extinct. It is a creature so strange, that no imagination could have fancied a bird without wings or tail, with robust legs, and with claws which are suited for digging, and are actually used in forming excavations, in which this singular bird lays its eggs, and hatches its young. If the Apteryx were to become extinct, and all that remained of it, after the lapse of one or two centuries, for the scrutiny of the naturalist were a foot in one Museum, and a head in another, with a few conflicting figures of its external form, the real nature and affinities of this most remarkable species would be involved in as much obscurity and doubt, and become the subject of as many conflicting opinions among the ornithologists of that period, as are those of the Dodo in the present day.
The Apteryx is not larger than a full-grown fowl, and has only a rudimentary wing, so covered with the body feathers as to be quite concealed; the terminating slender claw may, however, be discerned on examination.