As I have not been able to make anything of Murner's logical card-play, either as regards the instruments or the matter professed to be taught, I willingly avail myself of what Mons. Leber has said on the subject in his 'Etudes Historiques sur les Cartes à jouer.'—"These cards," says Mons. Leber, "made much noise in their time; and this might well be, for they were a novelty which it was easier to admire than to comprehend. At first people fancied that they saw in them the work of the devil; and it was even a question whether the author should not be burnt, seeing that he could be nothing more than a conjurer with the logicians of that age. But the conjurer's pupils made such extraordinary progress, that people cried out "wonderful!" and Murner's book was pronounced divine. Although those cards are fifty-two in number, they have nothing in common with our pack. They differ from all other cards, whether for gaming, or of fanciful device, in the multiplicity and the division of the suits, which the inventor has applied to the divisions of logic, after a method of his own. Of these suits there are no less than sixteen, corresponding with the same number of sections of the text, and having the following names and colours:
"Such is the whimsicality of those signs, and such the oddity of their relation to the things signified, that the learned Singer has been deterred from the attempt to make them known; at any rate, he declares that he will not undertake to explain that which even the most profound logicians of the day might not be able to comprehend. This is easily said, but we see no impossibility in explaining how the author understood himself. One example will be sufficient to give an idea of Murner's figured language, and of the the parts which might be played by serpents, cats, acorns, and crayfish in the chair of Aristotle when its occupant was a friar of the sixteenth century.
"The figure of a man with a crown on his head, a patch over one of his eyes, a book in one hand, and a trowel in the other, relates to section, or "Tractatus," X, APPELLATIO. It displays three symbols, the object of which is intelligence or definition: 1, the logical appellation; 2, relative terms or ideas which have become connected in the mind; 3, privative terms, expressive of privation or exclusion. The open book, [which appears shut] is the symbol of the definition; the trowel indicates connexion; and the patch over the eye signifies privation. The star, which occupies the place of the mark of the suit, and casts its light on all the other three symbols, signifies that clearness is the first merit in every definition." The cut here given is a fac-simile of that referred to.
Rogers, availing himself of the poetic license, though but to a small extent, has represented the followers of Columbus as playing at cards in his first voyage of discovery, to the West Indies, in 1492.
"At daybreak might the caravels be seen,
Chasing their shadows o'er the deep serene;