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NOTES AND QUERIES. [io* s. n. NOV. 5, im.

ampton, South-ampton, Tarn-worth, &c."; and whilst "Dannocks" is recognized as a corruption of Tournay (or rather of Doornik, the Flemish name), the same word spelt " Dornock" is erroneously referred to a Scotch town. Under ' Gibraltar ' we have an amal- gamation of personalities remediable by ob- serving that the Tarik Ibn Zeyad, from whom the fortress gets its name, landed in the neighbourhood in April, 711 ; whereas Tarifa records the landing of Tarif Abu Zora in the previous year on a scouting expedition ; and here it may be noted that Gibbon's date for the battle of Xeres, which followed these operations, differs slightly from the one given "s.v. ' .Roderick.' Again, it is difficult to recon- cile the assertion that "every available source" has been made use of with the acceptance of the onomatopoetic origin of "Taffata"; the fallacious derivation of "Varnish" from Berenice, which was based on passages in Eustathius and Salmasius ; the confusion under 'Periwinkle' of the plant and the mollusc ; the obtention of " Regale " from L. regalis, "Rote" from rota, "Marl" from argill, "Ledger-lines" from Dutch leggen, to lie, "Tout "from Tooting, "Racy" from relishy, " Tomboy " from Saxon tumbere, " Chemistry " from Arabic kamai, to conceal, " Halter " from hah, the neck, " Hob " from habban, to hold, and so on. Some of the etymologies, indeed, verge on the miraculous : " Drum " (a party) from drawing-room, for example ; " hobby- horse " from hobby - hause, hawk - tossing ; "nag " from Danish og, &c. ; or " fluke" from German gliick. Others rest on insecure foundations or have become obsolete, such as those given under ' Cheese,' * Foolscap,' * Gos- samer,' 'Drake,' 'Labyrinth,' ' Hussar,' 'Pam- per,' 'Strawberry,' 'Suffrage,' and several given under ' Lucus a non lucendo.' Of guess- derivations an unlucky instance occurs s.v. 'Curry Favour'; and another s.v. 'Tram,' where Outram is rightly rejected, but " Greek dram-ein, to run," is suggested. (It is in- teresting, by the way, to find the word dram, meaning timber from Drammen in Norway, used in English since the middle of the seventeenth century.) Many other false, faulty, or dubious etymologies might be in- stanced (for I have notes of a few dozen more), but the above will suffice to show that the prefatory guarantee is not sub- stantiated by the text. Reference should, however, be made to the mistaken assump- tion that the letter C represents the hollow of the hand, though originating in the Semitic gimel, a camel, and to the untenable hypo- thesis, s.v. ' Dover,' that Chaucer's " Jakke of Dovere That hath been twies hoot and

twies coold " was a leathern bottle filled with heel-taps. But an article on a subject cognate with the foregoing needs more extended con- sideration, from the miscellaneous character of the misinformation supplied.

An abundance of " Misnomers " of various kinds is contained in the English language, yet the list of them which finds a place in this work is a curiously infelicitous selection. There was, I think, something similar in a dilapidated copy of an early edition I used to possess, which makes the continued exist- ence of this article somewhat puzzling. On the basis of the examples given therein a lover of paradox would find little difficulty in showing that our mother tongue is chiefly composed of words meriting the appellation in question. For, dismissing " Louis de Bour- bon" and " Vallombrosa," which hardly be- come misnomers through alleged mistakes by Sir Walter Scott and Milton, and the un- intelligible entry under 'Cinerary,' we find "canopy" and "mosaic" included because they chance to resemble Canopus and Moses respectively; "fish" (a counter), "laudanum," and "cullander," because they have under- gone alterations in spelling during trans- ference to English ; " celandine " because it has a mythical origin; "frontispiece" and "sovereign" because misspelt; "acid" and "elements " because of their special chemical senses. If the cogency of such reasons be allowed, then their consistent application would yield surprising numerical results. But this is not all. The catalogue of mis- nomers would become of vast length if we admit that "pen " must be included because it etymologically means a feather ; " china," because of geographical origin ; " slave," be- cause in Slavonic it meant "illustrious" or "intelligible"; "sealing-wax," because no longer made of beeswax ; " lunatic," because formerly associated with the moon ; " meer- schaum," becauseits origin was misunderstood; " lunar caustic," because an alchemical term. By parity of reasoning, a very large propor- tion of common words would become mis- nomers crystal, damask, currant, villain, book, jovial, saturnine, amber, mercury, and hundreds more. In short, words such as these, of which the original meaning is popularly forgotten, cannot properly be called wrong names. Nor can erroneous deriva- tions such as those given under 'Antelope,' ' Custard,' ' Crawfish,' ' Foxglove,' and ' Greyhound ' be held to justify their inclu- sion in this article. As to the wonderful account of "down," with its paradoxical corollary that "going downstairs really means going upstairs," the less said the