There is only one spot in the world where these cards remain in their pristine condition and are played with to-day, and where they are offered for sale, and it is interesting to note that it is close to the place where the worship of Thoth first made its appearance in Europe. The Tarots are now used for playing several games, and these, if analysed, will show marks of the ancient mysteries. Through them can be traced not only a birthplace, but a history declared by de Gebelin to hark back to the borderland of civilization. He points out that the writers of his day have confined their studies to French cards used in Paris, when they were looking for the origin of playing cards, entirely ignoring, or at least never referring to, the Tarots, of which probably they had never heard. The history of French cards was not hard to relate, since it goes back little over three hundred years. There is a record of their birth, and, as has been mentioned, there are survivors of the original pack now to be seen in Les Cabinet des Estampes in Paris, which display Hearts, Diamonds, Clubs, and Spades. Merlin, Chatto, Singer, and Breitkopf look farther afield than de Gebelin's predecessors, whose writings are now forgotten, but all of them, while acknowledging that the images or the pips of the Tarots with which they are familiar have some connection with an old condition of affairs, fail to trace it, since no reliable historical or legal record of cards that are called "Playing Cards" can be discovered prior to the Middle Ages, so they assumed that cards could not have existed before that date, but the possibility that they might have lived and flourished under another name is overlooked. These authorities acknowledge that the shape, the sequence, and the grouping of the Tarots display system, which they decide is interesting but incomprehensible, yet they fail to unravel the significance of these arrangements. They touch upon the strange resemblance of various figures and their value in the game of _L'Ombre_ (The Man) to the civil law, philosophy, and religion of the ancient Romans, Greeks, or Egyptians. Mr. Singer points to one of the Atouts that he says "resembles the attributes of Osiris," and other cards impress him as recalling those of Mercury, as well as other mythological personages that he writes "seem to be found among the Atouts." But all the authors arrest themselves at this point without inquiring if these ancient gods whom they recognised were placed with intention or by chance on the cards, and, although they concede that the cards were used for divining purposes, they fail to connect them distinctly with the mysteries of past ages.