Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 2.djvu/432

 356

NOTES AND QUERIES.

. n. OCT. 29, 190*.

of Paulus yEginete, the very signs now used in prescriptions will be seen, amongst others, against Scripulum, Drackme, and Ouggia.

I may mention that our ounce is the same, to half a grain near, as the Koman ounce. The only ounce recognized by the Medical Council's * British Pharmacopoeia ' is the im- perial ounce of 437^ grains, one-sixteenth of the pound, of 7,000 grains. The drachm and scruple are not divisions of the ounce ; they are merely convenient units of 60 and of 20 grains. The fluid ounce is a measure of an imperial ounce of water ; it is divided for convenience into eight fluid drachms, each of sixty minims.

A curious muddle occurred in the schedule of our statute weights and measures, by which the Troy ounce (instead of being con- fined to bullion transactions, previous to dis- appearing, as the Troy pound disappeared many years ago) survives in a fossil series of apothecaries' weight, which is wanted by neither doctors nor druggists, and which is not recognized by the ' British Pharmacopoeia.' Thus the chemist and druggist buys his senna and his salts by the usual imperial weight, and he sells them by the same ; but should an ounce weight of any drug be ordered in a prescription, the 'Pharmacopoeia' tells him rightly to take an imperial ounce of 437^ grains, while the Board of Trade require him to use an old Troy ounce of 480 grains. There is practically not much inconvenience, for solid medicines are rarely prescribed in such a large quantity, but it is annoying to find a foolish. relic of a mischievous system surviving in our weights and measures.

EDWARD NICHOLSON.

Liverpool.

As DR. FOESHAW proposes to have this subject further discussed, I am emboldened to make a few further remarks thereon.

The resemblance of the thirty-first letter of the Russian (or thirty-fifth of the Servian) alphabet to the scruple sign may seem for- tuitous, but I do not think this to be the case. It is known that the alphabet in question is based chiefly on what is commonly termed the Cyrillic, and this, in turn, is derived from cursive Greek. Now I can think of no more likely source of the apothecaries' hiero- glyphics than Greek medical MSS. of the Middle Ages. In a collection of alphabets I have at hand Ballhorn's (Leipzig, 1853) I note several coincidences. The Russians have two es, the sixth letter being clearly Cyrillic and Greek epsilon ; but the thirty- first is a glagolitic importation. In the glago- litic alphabet this is the sixth letter (est\ an e, with the numerical value of 6, and obviously

Greek epsilon inverted. Hence both e' in Russian are ultimately the same letter.

To turn now to the ninth Cyrillic (Wal- achian or Servian), or the eighth Russian, ietter, this semla, or soft z, resembles closely the drachm sign. It is the Greek zeta, which [ante, p. 291) is said to represent the drachm because that weight was divided into six obols. The obol has dropped out of our apothecaries' weights, bufc the scruple, equal- ling two obols, remains. Can we infer, there- fore, that the est sign has been transferred from the lost obol to the scruple ?

The symbol for the ounce is also recog- nizable in the forty-fifth Cyrillic and thirty- eighth Wallachian as a reversed and some- what modified Greek (xi). The glagolitic m (numerical value 60) was represented both by a letter nearly the Greek M and by a sign like four drops hanging on a T-shaped figure.

There are also some other similarly inter- esting features in the glagolitic I apologize for the frequent repetition of this terrible word alphabet, one of them being the re- semblance of the fourth letter, glagoV, g, to- the percentage symbol. Hence I think that if some palaeographer or metrologist would examine these ancient Slavonic alpha- bets in connexion with the cursive Greek of old medical MSS. the origin of the mysterious apothecaries' signs would be revealed.

J. DORMER.

Surely the word drachm, drachma, is de- rived from Spao-a-opai, I grasp, and signified as much as could be grasped. Several words of measure seem to be formed from the same idea ; cf. thrave, twenty-four sheaves, properly an armful ; cf. Icelandic thrifa. See Skeat, s.v. Other instances of words- signifying definite measures formed from indefinite indications are cubit, scruple, and the German schock, used to indicate the number sixty. H. A. STRONG.

TICKLING TROUT (9 th S. xii. 505 ; 10 th S. L 154, 274, 375, 473 ; ii. 277). I find from M. Rolland's ' Faune Populaire de la France/ vol. iii. p. 131, that there is a proverb :

'"On chatouille la truite pour la mieux prendre..' Cette locution vierit de ce que le plongeur, ayanb decouvert des truites. leur passe la main sous le ventre afin qu'elles ne s'effarouchent pas et se laissent prendre plus facilement." In this country groping and grappling for trout are connected with the same mode of capture. ST. SWITHIN.

I MAJUSCULE (10 th S. ii. 288). -The 'N.E.D.' says, on its first page, that the phrase "A-per-se [means] the letter A when standing by itself, especially when making a word. The word