The most startling reminiscence of the old ordeal of brains is that of the Wartburg Contest in 1206 or 1207, under the Landgrave Hermann. The poem of the “Kriec von Wartburg” was not indeed composed till a century later, but that only makes it the more astonishing. It represents the minnesingers under the Landgrave contesting in song and riddle, and those who are defeated forfeit _life_. Christian knights and ladies could look on at a tourney in the lists with life at stake, and Christian knights and ladies in the fourteenth century thought it by no means a monstrous thing that he who could not answer a riddle should submit his neck to the executioner’s sword. Such a condition of ideas is only conceivable as a heritage from a past when men had to show that they had an intellectual as well as a physical qualification to live among their fellow-men. The riddle has gone into an infinity of forms. A German writer[39] sets to work to analyse its various manifestations. There is the numerical riddle, the conundrum, the logogryph, the charade, the rebus, the picture puzzle, the epigram, and so forth. Its last transformation is the novel of the type of Wilkie Collins’ “Moonstone,” in which the brain of the reader is kept in tension throughout, and the imagination at work to discover the solution of the question--Who stole the moonstone? A German poet, who cannot have thought much on the matter, says:-- “The riddle, charade, and all of that ilk, Are the bacon and beans of small brains.” But the riddle and the forfeit have had to do with the development of mankind, the killing out of the witless, and the survival of the intelligent. As the young were tested whether strong enough to live and by brute force to hold their own, so, apparently, at a remote period in man’s history the brains of the young were passed through ordeal, and those who lacked readiness were also cast out as profitless.