"Whom do you think I met in town last week, Brother William?" said Uncle Benjamin. "That old skinflint Jorkins. His family had been taking him around buying Christmas presents. He...
Certain numbers are called triangular, because if they are taken to represent counters or coins they may be laid out on the table so as to form triangles. The number 1 is always re...
A traveller, starting from town No. 1, wishes to visit every one of the towns once, and once only, going only by roads indicated by straight lines. How many different routes are th...
"This is queer," said McCrank to his friend. "Twopence added to twopence is fourpence, and twopence multiplied by twopence is also fourpence." Of course, he was wrong in thinking y...
Sometimes a very simple question in elementary arithmetic will cause a good deal of perplexity. For example, I want to divide the four numbers, 701, 1,059, 1,417, and 2,312, by the...
Anderson, Biggs, and Carpenter were staying together at a place by the seaside. One day they went out in a boat and were a mile at sea when a rifle was fired on shore in their dire...
How many continuous strokes, without lifting your pencil from the paper, do you require to draw the design shown in our illustration? Directly you change the direction of your penc...
Seat the same n persons at a round table on (n - 1)(n - 2) -------------- 2 occasions so that no person shall ever have the same two neighbours twice. This is, of course, equivalen...
A man was in love with a young lady whose Christian name was Hannah. When he asked her to be his wife she wrote down the letters of her name in this manner:-- H H H H H H H A A A A...
The mystery of Ravensdene Park, which I will now present, was a tragic affair, as it involved the assassination of Mr. Cyril Hastings at his country house a short distance from Lon...
Every one is familiar with the difficulties that frequently arise over the giving of change, and how the assistance of a third person with a few coins in his pocket will sometimes...
The practical usefulness of puzzles is a point that we are liable to overlook. Yet, as a matter of fact, I have from time to time received quite a large number of letters from indi...
I will now present another land problem. The demonstration of the answer that I shall give will, I think, be found both interesting and easy of comprehension. Farmer Wurzel owned t...
I recently asked myself the question: In how many different ways may a chessboard be divided into two parts of the same size and shape by cuts along the lines dividing the squares?...
The young lady in the illustration is confronted with a little cutting-out difficulty in which the reader may be glad to assist her. She wishes, for some reason that she has not co...
A wizard placed ten cats inside a magic circle as shown in our illustration, and hypnotized them so that they should remain stationary during his pleasure. He then proposed to draw...
Cut out of paper a Greek cross; then so fold it that with a single straight cut of the scissors the four pieces produced will form a square.
It will be seen that every square of the board is either occupied or attacked. The puzzle is to substitute a bishop for the rook on the same square, and then place the four queens...
If the end of the world should come on the first day of a new century, can you say what are the chances that it will happen on a Sunday?
The figure that is perplexing the carpenter in the illustration represents a mitre. It will be seen that its proportions are those of a square with one quarter removed. The puzzle...
A certain family party consisted of 1 grandfather, 1 grandmother, 2 fathers, 2 mothers, 4 children, 3 grandchildren, 1 brother, 2 sisters, 2 sons, 2 daughters, 1 father-in-law, 1 m...
If you take a rectangular piece of cardboard, twice as long as it is broad, and cut it in half diagonally, you will get two of the pieces shown in the illustration. The puzzle is w...
The knight is the irresponsible low comedian of the chessboard. "He is a very uncertain, sneaking, and demoralizing rascal," says an American writer. "He can only move two squares,...
A man recently bought two aeroplanes, but afterwards found that they would not answer the purpose for which he wanted them. So he sold them for L600 each, making a loss of 20 per c...
I paid a man a shilling for some apples, but they were so small that I made him throw in two extra apples. I find that made them cost just a penny a dozen less than the first price...
Construct a subtracting magic square with the first sixteen whole numbers that shall be "associated" by _subtraction_. The constant is, of course, obtained by subtracting the first...
Here is a funny little age problem, by the late Sam Loyd, which has been very popular in the United States. Can you unravel the mystery? The combined ages of Mary and Ann are forty...
The idea for this came to me when considering the game of Patience that I gave in the _Strand Magazine_ for December, 1910, which has been reprinted in Ernest Bergholt's _Second Bo...
"Now, constable," said the defendant's counsel in cross-examination," you say that the prisoner was exactly twenty-seven steps ahead of you when you started to run after him?" "Yes...
It will be seen that in this case the square patchwork quilt is built up of 169 pieces. The puzzle is to find the smallest possible number of square portions of which the quilt cou...