In the early European cards, which have cups, swords, pieces of money, and clubs or maces for the marks of the four suits,[61] the sword and piece of money of the Hindostanee cards are readily identified; and if we are to suppose that in these cards certain emblems of Vichnou were formerly represented--but which are not to be found either on the ordinary Playing Cards, or on those displaying the ten incarnations of Vichnou--it would not be difficult to account for the cups, and clubs or maces; for, according to Dr. Frederick Creutzer,[62] the mace or war club is frequently to be seen in one of the hands of Vichnou; and Count von Hammer-Purgstal remarks, that "the sword, the club, and the cup, are frequent emblems in the Eastern Ritual."[63] As the marks in European suits, cups, or chalices, swords, money, and clubs, have been supposed to represent the four principal classes of men in a European state, to wit, Churchmen; Swordmen, or feudal nobility; Monied men, merchants or traders; and Club-men, workmen, or labourers,--it is just as easy to run a parallel in the four superior suits of one of the packs of Hindostanee cards, given in Plate I; there may be found _Taj_, a crown, royalty; _Soofed_, silver money, merchants; _Shumsher_, a sword, fighting men, seapoys; and _Gholam_, a slave, the coolies both of hill and plain. It may not be unnecessary here to observe that the four great historical castes of the Hindoos are, 1, Bramins, priests; 2, Chetryas, soldiers; 3, Vaisyas, tradesmen and artificers; and 4, Sudras, slaves, and the lowest class of labourers. Of these four castes the Bramins alone remain unmixed; the other three, as distinct castes, exist only in name, for they have become so intermixed, that the subdivisions can neither be ascertained nor reckoned by the learned pundits themselves.[64] In the oldest stencilled, or printed, European cards, which are probably of as early a date as the year 1440, the marks of the suits are bells, hearts, leaves, and acorns; and in the Hindostanee cards we find a leaf or a flower, as the mark of one of the suits; and I am inclined to think that, in the latter, the figures of the oval, and of that which appears something like a pineapple in a shallow cup, were the types of the bells and the acorns. When those marks are compared, without reference to their being representations of specific objects of which the mind has already a preconceived idea, the general agreement of their forms is, to the eye, more apparent. For the heart, I have not been able to discover any corresponding mark in the Hindostanee cards. Should I be told that the form of the heart might be suggested by that of the leaf, I have to observe that the form of the leaf in Hindostanee cards, is not the same as that which occurs in European, and that in the latter, the colour of the so-called heart appears always to have been red.