It therefore followed that the history and traditions peculiar to the ceremonies connected with that personage should be studied in order to trace Playing Cards to their birthplace and find for them an origin, without weakly stopping at the fourteenth century, and declaring that cards came out of space, as many authors have done. The heraldic devices of Mercury, which are the emblems of what has always been called, by historians, "The Book of Thoth Hermes Trismegistus," are in themselves mute proof of the connection of the Tarots (as they are now called) with the cult of Mercury. These cards are the oldest ones known, and the symbols are retained in Italian Tarots of to-day, so it may be allowed that when Playing Cards are studied as the leaves of the book of a cult, not as a game, their own pictures relate the story that has lain dormant for many hundreds of years. They only required to have a key in order to be intelligible to any one interested in the subject, and this has been furnished by recognizing the four attributes of Mercury in the card pips, which had escaped the notice of students until the present time, as well as the attributes of the picture part of the pack called the Atouts, which are those of Egyptian gods. The popular notion that cards were invented for the amusement of a crazy French king is quite disproved by the historical records of the Tarots of the fourteenth century and the packs that survive. There are some beautiful specimens in Mr. Pierpont Morgan's collection, the emblems and devices of which are identical with records of the ancient Tarots, and these cards are very much older than the French packs. Although the gap between the old cards and the worship of Mercury in Etruria is still to be bridged through accurate historical data, the inferential connection is too strong to be ignored and the rules of the games played with the cards intended for prophesying or fortune-telling, as well as the tradition connected with the Tarots themselves offer connecting links with the cult of Mercury that cannot afford to be disregarded, as has been done hitherto. Mr. Stuart Culin, in his introduction to "Korean Games," says: "Investigation has been hitherto comparatively unproductive of results from the fact that most students have failed to perceive the true significance of games in primitive culture, regarding them primarily as pastimes." But he traces many of the games which are common to all children all over the world to a "sacred and divinatory origin, a theory that finds confirmation in their traditional associations, such as the use of cards in fortune-telling."