Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 3.djvu/426

 350

NOTES AND QUERIES.

s. m. MAY 6, wos.

master one Capt. [blank], lying before Charlton [Charlestown, now part of Boston], was blown in pieces with her own powder, being 21 barrels ; wherein the judgment of God appeared, for the master and company were many of them profane scoffers at us, and at the ordinances of religion here." Ibid., ii. 13.

The wreck was a nuisance, and on 7 Octo- ber, 1641, the General Court made the following order :

"About the rack : Edward Bendall haveing order to seeke to clear the ry ver of it, & if hee cleare the harbo r, hee is to have all w ch hee can get up ; if not, hee is to have the one halfe, & the country is to have the other halfe. For the clearing of the harbo r hee hath liberty till the first of the 8 th m [i.e. October] 1642 ; & hee is to give account to the Treasurer, from time to time, & to leave the full haulfe, or give security," 'Massachusetts Colony Records,' i. 339.

Once more we have recourse to Winthrop who, under date of 23 July, 1642, wrote : , " The Mary Rose, which had been blown up and sunk with all her ordnance, ballast, much lead, and other goods, was now^yeighed and brought to shore by the industry and diligence of one Edward Ben- dall, of Boston. The court gave the owners above a years time to recover her and free the harbor, which was much damnified by her ; and they having given her over and never attempting to weigh her, Edward Bendall undertook it upon these terms, viz., if he freed the harbor, he should have the whole, otherwise he should have half of all he recovered. He made two great tubs, bigger than a butt, very tight, and open at one end, upon which were hanged so many weights as would sink it to the ground (600wt.). It was let down, the diver sitting in it, a cord in his hand to give notice when they should draw him up, and another cord to show when they should remove it from place to place, so he could continue in his tub near half an hour, and fasten ropes to the ordnance, and put the lead, &c., into a net or tub. And when the tub was drawn up, one knocked upon the head of it, and thrust a long pole under water, which the diver laid hold of, and so was drawn up by it; for they might not draw the open end out of water for endangering him, "&c. 'Hist, of New England,' ii. 87-8.

It would be extremely interesting to know whether Bendall's contrivance was an inven- tion of his own, or whether the idea of it had been brought from England. The diving- bell which Evelyn says was tried atDeptford, 19 July, 1661, " was made of cast lead, let down with a strong cable." The principle of the diving - bell was apparently known in New England in 1640, for the owners of the Mary Rose were given more than a year in which to raise her, and she actually was raised in 1642. This was twenty years earlier than the experiment recorded by Evelyn.

ALBERT MATTHEWS. Boston, Mass.

In the time of Aristotle divers used a kind of kettle to enable them to continue longer under water. This, however, has been dis

puted, because the manner in which it was imployed is not clearly described. The oldest information respecting the use of the diving- bell in Europe is that of John Taisnier, quoted in Schott's ' Technica Curiosa,' Nurem- berg, 1664, lib. vi. c. 9, p. 393. Taisnier himself saw the diving-bell put to practical use in the year 1538, before the Emperor Charles V. and almost ten thousand spectators, at Toledo, in Spain. The two Greeks who made the experiment seem to have owed their in- vention to Aristotle's suggestion, for they used a very large kettle suspended by ropes with the mouth downward. Schott also de- scribes this machine as " an aquatic kettle." The contrivance is described more than once in Roger Bacon's ' Novum Organum ' and in his ' Phsenomena Universi.' A hollow vessel, he says, was made of metal, and was let down equally to the surface of the water, and thus carried with it to the bottom of the sea the whole air it contained. It stood upon three feet, which were in length somewhat less than the height of a man ; so that the diver, when he was no longer able to contain his breath, could put his head into the vessel, and, having breathed, return again to his work (' Novum Organum,' lib. ii. 50, quoted in Beckmann's ' Hist, of Inventions,' 1846, vol. i. p. 115). See also a later account in Timbs's 'Stories of Inventors and Discoverers,' 1860, pp. 32-42.

J. HOLDEN MACMlCHAEL.

TO-DAY : TO-MORROW (10 th S. iii. 305). I am astonished at being asked to produce my evidence on this point. It would be easy to cite many hundred examples, from the ninth century onwards, in which the phrases to-day, to-morroiv, and even to-year occur ; always composed of the same elements, viz., the preposition to as the former element, and the substantive day, morroiv, or year as the second element, usually in the dative case. Why is the dative employed if there is no preposition to govern it? I only mentioned the use of to dnum dcec/e by way of illustra- tion of to dcege. They are, of course, not exactly equivalent, because the one contains dnum and the other does not. But the con- structions are similar otherwise.

We are not told how the phrase " I '11 see ye the morn" arose, nor what is its antiquity. It is common enough now ; but where can we find it in any Middle English author, or in any Anglo-Saxon writer ? Let us have an example, just one little one !

The saying that to the in the phrase " t ' archdeacon " is beyond us all. In this phrase f is a well-known contraction for