In Persia, where only the Atout or figure part of the pack is used, while the pip part is omitted, the figures are painted in harmonious colours and it is left for the tints of the background to indicate the suits. In the Kile Kort or Cucu pack of Sweden (which also has figures) there are no colours whatever, but the designs are printed in black ink on white cardboard. This is also the case with old cards from the Netherlands, but none of these packs were ever intended for fortune-telling. There have been many persons who have interested themselves in the history of playing cards, and some of them have pierced the veil surrounding their cradle; but, generally, since these students have only been interested in the cards as toys or gambling instruments or as rare specimens of painting, engraving or stencilling, the studies have not extended beyond the time when playing cards became common in Europe, or about the beginning of the fourteenth century. None of these students followed the clues that would have proved the original purport of the "tablets of fate." In "Les Etudes Historique sur les Cartes à Jouer," by M. C. Leber (1842), the question is asked: "Where do cards come from, what are they and what do they say?" These queries the writer proceeds to answer only in part, for he fails to see the connection of the cards familiar to him, that have French or German pips, with the more ancient Tarots, which, in all probability, he had never seen. But Leber states positively that cards "are of ancient origin and Eastern invention, and primarily they constitute a symbolic and moral game." He professes to be guided by the emblems on the cards themselves, but he fails to decipher or to understand the evidences shown by the heraldic devices peculiar to one of the ancient Greek gods, which would have answered his questions. According to the Rev. Edward Taylor and other authorities, the emblematic and mystic cards called Tarots were "born long since in the East, from whence they were brought by the gypsies for thaumaturgic purposes." Although it is declared that the gypsies always carried and consulted packs of cards ever since the wanderers were known in Europe, these people themselves have no history of their mystic book that they will disclose, so the positive historical record of playing cards as used for gambling games or fortune-telling does not commence before the second half of the fourteenth century. These cards are the ones we call Tarots, which are still common in Italy, and the emblems on the cards themselves reveal their original connection with the worship of Mercury in Etruria, of Thoth in Egypt, and of Nebo in Babylonia. These three gods have the same attributes, and were worshipped for many generations in the then civilised portions of the world; yet the forms of their worship, that have been so strangely transmitted to us through the greatest of their books, the cards are now little understood and seldom consulted.