THE subject of this letter are some cursory observations made by me last spring, upon viewing the curiosities found at Herculaneum, and the places adjacent. I deferred putting them into any order, till I came to town, and had seen, by perusing the Transactions of the Royal Society, whether some abler hand had not already prevented me, and made any further communication needless: but as I now find, that no notice has been hitherto taken of several particulars, which, in my humble opinion, deserved it, as tending to throw new light upon antiquity; I beg leave to trouble you with my thoughts upon them. I shall begin with the museum in the King of the Two Sicilies’ palace at Portici; wherein, amongst a great number of other ancient and valuable remains, are these that follow, _viz._ I. Several _tali lusorii_. The _tali_ are supposed to have been known to the Greeks[28] by the name of Ἀϛράγαλοι as early as the Trojan war. But as the monuments before us are undoubtedly Roman, I shall confine my remarks upon them to the usages received among that people; and being guided partly by what appears upon the face of these antiquities, and partly by what the Latin classics have delivered in general upon this subject, beg leave to observe, in the first place, that the _tali_ had each of them but four sides, two broader, and the other two more narrow, on which they would ordinarily rest; as the rounding of their ends did not easily permit them to stand upon those parts. However, the possibility of such a position (tho’ it did not occur to me to make the experiment with these pieces) may be deduced from a passage in Tully[29]. Further, with regard to the manner of distinguishing the several sides of the _tali_, some learned[30] writers speak of it according to ideas taken from the fashion of marking the modern dice, and (I may add) the ancient _tesseræ_ likewise: but, as I did not observe the traces of any engraving, painting, _&c._ upon the pieces under consideration, it seems to me more probable, what others assert[31], that this distinction was effected by the different configuration of the sides themselves, and not by any numbers marked upon them. And concerning this notation, the common opinion is, that the appearances expressing _one_ and _six_, as also those representing _three_ and _four_, were opposed to each other respectively. But leaving these (however probable) conjectures, we can with certainty determine the number of the _tali_ used in this game to have been four; and likewise, that among the various chances resulting from them, the most fortunate one was that, wherein each of the sides exhibited a different aspect. The former of these circumstances we learn from Tully[32], as we do the latter from Martial, who, in a distich sent with a present of a set of _tali_ to a friend, says, _Cum steterit nullus vultu tibi talus eodem, Munera me dices magna dedisse tibi_[33].