First Living Cells
This first live forebear of all living things, including Man himself, was formed by chance, probably over 3,500 million years ago. Scientists have shown that the building blocks of life – carbon-containing organic molecules – existed on Earth, and in space, soon after the planet’s formation 4,600 million years ago. They were in the gases that made Earth’s atmosphere, in the outpourings of volcanic eruptions, in the meteorites that pounded the young planet – and even in the dust of space itself.
Space probes by the US and former Soviet Union have confirmed that carbon molecules exist in the icy bodies and tails of comets, such as Halley’s comet, which periodically passed close to Earth. Astronomers have identified 75 different interstellar complex molecules that have come into being in the star-forming clouds of space. Living cells need protein molecules to form their structure, and DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) molecules to hold information on how to develop. Both protein and DNA are formed from other molecules, called amino acids and bases. These consist of even simpler molecules. The odds against the correct combinations coming together by chance are enormous. Yet somehow, within the Earth’s first five thousand million years, they did.
Lighting bolts from electrical storms bombarded the Earth and its watery surface, where shallow pools lay rich with organic molecules – a warm soup of potential life. Massive doses of ultraviolet radiation from the sun poured down into the atmosphere and on to the surface, as yet unprotected by oxygen and an ozone layer. Great numbers of meteorites – some probably containing complex molecules such as amino acids – pierced the unresisting atmosphere and plummeted to Earth. Lava and hot gases poured out of volcanic fissures and spewed violently forth from eruptions, creating hot-spots in the atmosphere, and adding more gases to its composition.
Single cell life
Triggered by the energy from these violent natural events, the molecules in the primeval soup joined up to form complex chains. So a few hundred million years after the Earth’s formation, all the components of living cells were present in the ocean and it was only a matter of time before they were organized into cells. These came into being when various fats and protein joined together to form an outer membrane. This separated the contents of the cell from the water it floated in.
For over 2,000 million years, cells remained tiny and primitive, each hardly and thousandth of a millimetre in diameter. The first living cell split into two, each containing the DNA information necessary for further development. Two became four, and four became eight. Eventually those cells lived in teeming accumulations, millions to the cubic centimetre.
Cell mutations
As these cells reproduced, slight changes or mutations occurred in them. Sometimes these chance mutations were favourable and they helped the cell survive, often in conditions different from those in which the parent cell lived. Some cells eventually mutated into a life form that contained chlorophyll, the substance that makes plants green. With the assistance of chlorophyll, these cells started to make sugars using the energy of sunlight.
The sunlight – using cells needed hydrogen for energy conversion. They obtained it by splitting water molecules into their separate hydrogen and oxygen components. The cells used the hydrogen and released the oxygen as waste, Great matted masses of these oxygen gen-releasing cells lived in warm, shallow seas. After hundreds of millions of years, oxygen build up into a significant ingredient in the Earth’s atmosphere.
A new type of cell began to develop about 1,400 million years ago. Dependent on oxygen, this new cell was larger and much more complex. It had special nucleus for its DNA, and had at least a thousand times as much earlier, more primitive cells. Called a eukaryote, which means true nucleus, the new cell developed the ability to join up with other cells and share genetic information, so that their offspring’s had a much larger fund of genetic possibilities. Eukaryotes also became capable of forming multi-celled organisms, in which the individual cells have particular tasks. Nearly all life in today’s world is formed of eukaryote cells. The first fossils of multicellular life forms are 750 million years old
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English playing-cards are known and used all over the world - everywhere where Bridge and Poker are played. In England, the same pack is used for other games such as Whist, Cribbage, Rummy, Nap and so on. But in other European countries games such as Skat, Jass, Mus, Scopa, and Tarock are played, using cards of totally different face-designs many of them with roots far older than English cards. The history of these national and regional patterns has only recently become the concern of students and collectors. 
The earliest authentic references to playing-cards in Europe date from 1377, but, despite their long history, it is only in recent decades that clues about their origins have begun to be understood. Cards must have been invented in China, where paper was invented. Even today some of the packs used in China have suits of coins and strings of coins - which Mah Jong players know as circles and bamboos (i.e. sticks). Cards entered Europe from the Islamic empire, where cups and swords were added as suit-symbols, as well as (non-figurative) court cards. It was in Europe that these were replaced by representations of courtly human beings: kings and their attendants - knights (on horseback) and foot-servants. To this day, packs of Italian playing-cards do not have queens - nor do packs in Spain, Germany and Switzerland (among others). There is evidence that Islamic cards also entered Spain, but it now seems likely that the modern cards which we call Spanish originated in France, ousting the early Arab-influenced designs. 
In Germany and Switzerland, the two lower court cards are both on foot, representing an 'upper' and a 'lower' rank-as stated in the 1377 description of playing-cards. Switzerland also preserves another feature of early German cards. The tens are represented by a banner, showing just one suit-symbol-though many old German banners show ten symbols. In these countries also, the 52-card pack was shortened to 48 cards by dropping the Aces. The deuce, or Daus, was then promoted to being the top card, and nowadays often carries the letter A as if it were an ace. The pack was then shortened even further. German single-figure packs habitually carried delightful vignettes of genre scenes at the base of the numeral cards-usually lost when packs became double-ended. 
The resulting cards were, of course, totally unusable for play when they had no corner-indices, and indeed the publishers of early packs recommended that the blank backs should be used as visiting cards (a very important item in high society). Nevertheless, almost from the beginning, court cards were also provided so as to complete the pack. In Europe these were drawn from literary sources, though in England a more humorous approach prevailed. It is probable that such ideas helped to propel a tendency for playing-cards to keep up with current fashions and trends. Even the more run-of-the-mill continental cards tended to have elegantly clad and fashionably coiffured ladies instead of crowned queens. 
English card-players also clung to the traditional, but frankly ugly, designs of their court cards, which had remained virtually unchanged since before 1700. Prior to that era, we have scanty information about the designs of everyday cards, since few of them have survived. An English educational pack of 'Memory cards' of c.1605 includes copies of elegant court cards made in Rouen, where cards of a particular design were made especially for export to England. Study of these cards goes far to explain peculiar features of later English-made versions. The crudity of these copies was due to inept English block-cutters trying, with home-made products, to compensate for the effect of the 1628 ban on importation of foreign cards. In fact, the accidental stylisation has proved to be a functional factor of stabilising influence in ensuring the durability of these designs. Most modern English-style cards still betray signs of their ancestry. 
It was on 22nd October 1628 that Charles I granted the charter to the Company of the Mistery of Makers of Playing Cards of the City of London, and from 1st December that year all future importation of playing cards was forbidden. In return, a duty on playing-cards was demanded, and the subsequent history of attempts to extract that duty makes an unedifying and contradictory story, as any student of such matters knows. The Livery Company still exists, and, despite the almost total cessation of production of playing-cards in Britain, flourishes. In 1994 it achieved its highest ambition in the City of London, when a former Master of the Company, Alderman Christopher Walford, became Lord Mayor. Towards the end of his term of office, he opened an exhibition of playing-cards in the Print Room at Guildhall Library, which houses a collection of historic playing-cards belonging to the Worshipful Company of Makers of Playing Cards, the nucleus of which was donated by the 'Father of the Company' Mr Henry Druitt Phillips, in 1907. 
In parts of India, games are played with packs of circular cards with eight, ten or more suits, whose designs reflect either the departmental structure of an Indian rajah's court or the incarnations of Vishnu (or other more complex systems), and are played something like Whist with no trumps but with extra complications. Earlier this century, it was claimed that there was a connection between the four-suited European pack and the four-handed game of chess played in India, but this theory has now been discredited in the light of the connection with the Islamic world.