Complaints of racecourse gambling began early in the present century. In the _Gentleman’s Magazine_ for 1801 (p. 327) we read: “Mr Urban—As the quarter sessions will take place in most parts of England in the course of the present month, I wish, through the medium of your extensively circulated Magazine, to submit to the serious consideration of the County Magistrates, the absolute necessity for adopting some vigorous measures, in order to check the career of those infamous swindlers, who are in the constant habit of attending our fairs and races with E.O. tables, &c. It is an alarming fact that there is scarcely a fair, or a race, of the least celebrity, which is not infested with these villains, many of whom clear £500 annually by plundering the unsuspecting rustics, who attend such places, of their property.” Goldsmith, in his life of Beau Nash, tells us that E.O. was first set up at Tunbridge, in the reign of George I., and was introduced into Bath by Nash: and, as the game was a very popular one, I give the following description of it, as found in Rice’s _History of the British Turf_: “The E.O. table was circular in form, and, though made in various sizes, was, commonly, four feet in diameter. The outside edge formed the counter, or _depôt_, on which the stakes were placed, and was marked all round with the letters E.O. from which the game took its name. The interior of the table consisted of a stationary gallery, in which the ball rolled, and an independent round table, moving on an axis, by means of handles. The ball was started in one direction, and this rotary table turned in the other. This part was divided into forty compartments of equal size, twenty of which were marked E. and twenty O. The principle was pretty much as that of roulette without a zero; but the ingenuity of the proprietors appears, at an early date in the history of these tables, to have supplied this defect. At first the game was played on the same terms as hazard then was, viz., whoever won, or threw in three times successively, paid, when gold was played for, half a guinea to the proprietors of the table. This, however, as might have been expected, was too simple and unsophisticated a method of procedure to last. The game was too fair; but, as it was very popular, it must be made profitable to the man of business, who could not be expected to travel from race meeting to race meeting all over the country, for half guineas in cases of exceptional luck. Accordingly, he became obliged to take all bets offered either for E. or for O., and made two of his forty spaces into ‘bar holes.’ The name sufficiently explains the utility of the device to the keeper of the table. If the ball fell into either of these ‘bar holes,’ he won all the bets on the opposite letter, and did not pay to that on which it fell. Unfair tables, having the compartments of one letter larger than another, abounded; but there seems to have been little necessity to