Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 2.djvu/431

 ii. OCT. 29, low.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

355

Bishop Berkeley when living at Newpor about 1730. Not far off is Purgatory, a dee_ and unpleasant-looking pit in the cliff, into which the sea enters.

I have seen in Germany a country inn called Heaven. M. N. G.

A street in Whitchurch, Salop, was, unti some twenty years ago, known as Paradis< Street to the Pqst Office and the elect, th hoi polloi preferring to style it the u tin-hoi road." Both parties have now compromiser on Talbot Street. HELGA.

Dundee has a Paradise Road, where fo many years lived the Rev. George Gilfillan " critic, poet, and divine." THOMAS KYD.

Aberdeen.

I was born in Paradise Row, overlooking the racecourse in the city of Chester. In the same city, in Handbridge, a suburb across the Dee, is a row of cottage houses known as Paradise.

T. CANN HUGHES, M.A., F.S.A.

Lancaster.

There is a Paradise Row in Birmingham running from the front of the Town Hal] towards Edgbaston.

EDWARD P. WOLFERSTAN.

In this town we have Paradise and Paradise Vale as names of houses; and in the neigh- bouring town of Kelso, Paradise is also used to designate a house.

J. LINDSAY HILSON.

Public Library, Jedburgh. [No further replies on this subject can be inserted.]

HUMOROUS STORIES (10 th S. ii. 188, 231). 'Hicks's Great Jury Story' is contained in ' Tales and Sayings of William Robert Hicks of Bodmin,' by W. F. Collier, published about 1892 by Messrs. Brendon & Son, Plymouth. The occasion was the trial of a Cornish doctor for poisoning his mother-in-law, and the story purports to be related to Mr. Hicks by one of the jurymen who arrived at a verdict of acquittal. W. B. H.

JOANNES v. JOHANNES (10 th S. ii. 189, 274). At any rate, on my matriculation paper, dated at Oxford, 10 February, 1848, and on four other documents, signed by some of the leading scholars in the university, my spon- sorial appellation, as Dr. Pangloss calls it, is legibly written Joannes.

JOHN PICKFORD, M.A.

Newbourue Rectory, Woodbridge.

PRESCRIPTIONS (10 th S. i. 409, 453; ii. 56, 291). To the questions regarding the origin of the abbreviations used in medical pre-

scriptions the replies have not been very satisfactory. One of them, indeed, assumes that a scrupulum being half an obolus, its sign was a half of the O which was the sign of the latter. From Roman times onward the obolus has always had the sense of a half, as a halfpenny, <fec.; the medical obolus was half a scruple, the latter term having the sense of one-twenty-fourth; the scruple was the twenty-fourth of an ounce, as the carat was the twenty-fourth of the solidus, the assay-unit, and the grain a twenty- fourth of a pennyweight. I venture to give an explanation which will, I think, be found to be not far from correct, if it does not go quite to the root of the subject.

For the mystic R at the head of a prescrip- tion I accept Charles Reade's explanation (in * Hard Cash,' if I mistake not) : " O Jupiter, be favourable unto us!"

The sign for the denarius mentioned in one of the replies was not that of the zodiacal Pisces, but simply an X (denoting the ten units of the coin-weight) with a line across it. I need hardly say that the medical weights and measures of the Roman system, largely derived from the Greek, were generally used by Greek physicians. With these, the sign For the Roman scrupulum or gramma was the first two letters of the latter word, that is, a capital gamma with a well-curved ro, the atter crossed horizontally, as is usual in abbreviations. Now reverse this symbol, and the evolution of the scruple sign, a very curved E reversed, becomes evident.

The Roman ounce (437 grains) was at first divided into seven denarii, or pennyweights, and these were the usual units of prescrip- wndere denarii decem. ten pennyweights (of course the capital X should be crossed), liater on, it was divided into eight drachma 3 , each of three scrupula or grammata. The ign for the drachma was at first the Greek efcter z, which, denoting six, signified that he drachm was equal to six oboli, or half- cruples. The Greek letter became replaced >y a Roman Z; this acquired at its lower xtremity a downward curl, which grew until he sign became that which we now use.
 * ions in the time of Celsus; p. Xx meant

The sign for the ounce was the Greek letter

reversed. This letter, originally the ign of the (tsylmphon (the Roman acetabulum)
 * with a little o, of the xestes or pint if with

little e, became when reversed the sign of le Roman ounce as adopted by the Greeks, n the ' Table of the usual Characters of the Veights and Measures used by the Greek nd Roman Authors ' appended to the Sy den- am Society's English edition of the works