Thecomparative study of games is one that promises an important contribution to the history of culture. The questions involved in' their diffusion over the earth are among the Vital ones that confound the ethnologist. Their origins are lost in the unwritten history of the child hood of man. Mancala is a game that is remarkable for its peculiar distribution, which seems to mark the limits of Arab culture, and which has just penetrated our own continent after having served for ages to divert the inhabitants of nearly half the inhabited area of the globe.