The annual general meeting of the China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society was holden Thursday night (1oth)inthe Society's Hall, Moseum Road, Mr. N. J. Hamen, the President, occupying the chair. There was not a large attendance, Before the prosentat the repeat and accounts, Mr. Z. Volpicelli, the Hou, Secretary, rend paper on the Chinese game of Tim Kou (Yien-chiv) as played with cards and dumi-
Mr. Volpicelli, in the course of his lecture said that' Chinese dominoes are shaped like curs but diter in the following points first, the pips are not all black, the aces and fours being always represented by red pips wherever they occur; the double sixes are also represented by one six composed of three red pips and three black ones, parallel to ancther six composed of three black pips and three red ones, Secondly, there ure no blanks, all the figures being from one Frou this it is clear that if the Chi our combinations, ie. exch number combined only once with itself and every other number, there would only be 21 pieces, Thirdly, the Chinese have a number of duplicatepieces, which the lecturer enumerated. in the way that seems most. conducive to easy remembering; firstly, all the doubles are in duplicate, two double sixes, two double fives, ete., secondly. six-five, six-four are also in duplicate, and trey-nee. These three class eleven pieces to the 21 which we hnd already found; waking the total 92 in all, The existence of duplicates causes some discrepancy in the number of exch knd, Tu our game of dominoes there is the same number of exch kind, seven sixes, seven fives, ete. down to seven blanks, The Chinere have no blanks, so there are only six of each kind if we disregard dupli-exten. Let ux examine how many will be added to ench kind by the duplicates, Let us begin with the sixes. To the original six different. ones we must add a dupliene double six, and duplicates of 6-5, 6-4, 6-1 four in all) So that there are ten. pieces which have one or two sixes marked on them. To the six fives we must udd the duplicates of double five, of five-six and of five-ace so that there are nine pieces with one or two fives marked on them. Of course two of these pieces have already been counted among the sixes i.e, the two five-sixes, For the fours there are duplicates for double four and 6-4 90 there are eight fours, in all of which three have been alrendy counted two six-fours among the sixes and tive-fours among the fives. In the trey class there are dup! cates for double-trey and trey-nce 80 we have eight pieces with one or two treys narked on them, of which three have already been counted among the preceding classes, i.e. 6-3, 5-3 and 4-3. In the deuce class we have only one duplicate @ouble-deuce so we have only seven pieces for this class; of which four have already been counted among the preceding classes i.e, six-deuce, five-deuce, four-deuce and trey-deuce, ' In the ace, class we have duplicates for double-ace, six-ace, five-ace and trey-ace, thus having ten pieces for this diss ut which no less than eight have already been counted among preceding classes viz., two six-ace, two five-ace, four-ace, two trey-ace, deuce-ace.
The Chinese have a class of games with their dominoes which resembles our block and draw game, which they call catching the dragon" (BELIE), which admits like our similar class " variety of subdivisions it can be played by two or three players with or without a pool. When two players play they. can either each take 8 pieces, leaving 16 pieces, which either of them can touch or each take 16 pieces leaving none. In
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.