The Chinese and Indian games of skill, such as Chess, are of great antiquity; but, perhaps, the oldest game is that of _Enclosing_, called _Wei-ki_ in Chinese, and _Go_ in Japanese. It is said to have been invented by the Emperor Yao, 2300 B.C., but the earliest record of the game is in 300 B.C. It is a game like _Krieg spiel_, a game of war. There are not only typical representatives of the various arms, but the armies themselves, some 200 men on each side; they form encampments, and furnish them with defences; and they slay, not merely a single man, as in other games, but, frequently, hosts of men. There is no record of its being a gambling game, but the modern Chinese is an inveterate gambler. As far as we know, the ancient Jews did not gamble except by drawing, or casting lots; and as we find no word against it in the inspired writings, and, as even one of the apostles was chosen by lot (Acts i. 26), it must be assumed that this form of gambling meets with the Divine approval. We are not told how the lots were _drawn_; but the _casting_ of lots pre-supposes the use of dice, and this seems to have been practised from very early times, for we find in Lev. xvi. 8, that “Aaron shall cast lots upon the two goats; one lot for the Lord, and the other lot for the scape goat.” And the promised land was expressly and divinely ordained to be divided by an appeal to chance. Num. xxvi. 52 and 55, 56, “And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying.... Notwithstanding the land shall be divided by lot: according to the names of the tribes of their fathers they shall inherit. According to the lot shall the possession thereof be divided between many and few.” The reader can find very many more references to the use of the “lot” in any Concordance of the Bible. But in their later days, as at the present time, the Jews did gamble, as Disney[3] tells us when writing on Gaming amongst the Jews. “Though they had no written law for it, Gamesters were _excluded from the Magistracy_, incapable of being chosen into the greater or lesser Sanhedrim; nor could they be admitted as _Witnesses_ in any Court of Justice, till they were perfectly reformed. Some of their reasons for excluding such from the Magistracy were, that their gaming gave sufficient presumption of their _Avarice_, and, besides, was an employment _no way conducing to the public good_: a covetous man, and one who is not wise and public spirited, being very unfit for offices of so much trust and power, as well as dignity. The presumption of _Avarice_ was the cause, also (and a very good one), of not admitting _the evidence_ of such a man. And that other notion they had, that the gain arising from play was a _sort of Rapine_, is as just a ground for the _Infamy_ which stained his character, and subjected him to these incapacities.