"Beginning with pagancia in ancient Rome, golf has had many ancestors in many distant lands, all similar in one way or another to the game we know today. These now long-lost pastimes included chole (soule in Belgium), with similarities to both hockey and gold, kolven in the Netherlands, sometimes played on ice and a game whose name may have evolved into the word "golf"; and pall-mall (also called mail, pele male, jeu de mail), a game played first in the streets of Italy before spreading across Europe and finally arriving in Scotland. The impact of these games on the modern architecture of gold is remote, if it exists as all; yet they made golf possible. An informative account of these pregolf games is presented by Robert Browning in his History of Golf: The Royal and Ancient Game. He says that "It was the Scots who devised the essential features of gold, the combination of hitting for distance with the final nicety of approach to an exigous mark, and the independent progress of each player with his own ball free from interference by his adversary.""