Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 4.djvu/236

 194 NOTES AND QUERIES. [io» s. iv. SEFT. 2.1905. of Seleucus.' It will be seen that Berenice, the wife of Ptolemy III., was the daughter of Magas. She was officially described as the king's sister and wife. This and the frequency among the Ptolemies of the union between brother and sister presumably gave rise to a misunderstanding in the present instance. EDWARD BENSLY. 23, Park Parade, Cambridge. The best modern opinion is that Berenice, •wife of Ptolemy III. Euergetes, was the •daughter of Magas, King of Cyrene, not of Ptolemy II. Philadelphus. All that can be said is that ancient authorities are incon- sistent; see Smith's 'Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography,' <tc., ' Berenice.' Smith's ' Dictionary,' Wilcken in Pauly's ' Ency- •clopadie' (1897) under 'Berenice,' and Ellis in his commentary on the sixty-sixth poem of Catullus (Introduction, and on verse 22), all treat her as the daughter of Magas. SETSURE. In answer to LADY RUSSELL let me refer her to Dr. Mahafiy's ' History of Egypt under the Ptolemaic Dynasty ' (Methuen <fc Co., 1899). Ptolemy Euergetes was the son of Ptolemy Philadelphus by Arsinoe, his first wife, who was not his sister. Philadelphus afterwards married his sister, who was also named Arsinoe, and this is the first instance of such a marriage amongst the Greek kings of Egypt. Euergetes was betrothed, during his father's lifetime, to Berenice, the daughter of Magas, whilst she was a child soon after the death of her father, King of Cyrene, and married her soon after his accession. It was her hair which was stolen from the temple, and supposed to have been elevated to the heavens, the constellation Coma Berenices (now usually called by astronomers simply Coma) still bearing the name then given to it. Queen Berenice was ultimately put to death by her son, Ptolemy Philopator, who thus anticipated Nero as a matricide. W. T. LYNN. "THE SCREAMING SKULL" (10th S. iv. 107)- —There is a skull, said to be that of a negro murdered by his master, a Roman Catholic priest, at Bettiscombe House, near Bridport, in Dorsetshire. Several attempts, it is said, have been made to bury or otherwise dispose of this skull, with the invariable results of •dreadful screams proceeding from the grave, unaccountable disturbances about the house, and other equally unpleasant occurrences. An account of the house and skull, on the •authority of Dr. Richard Garnett, will be found in Ingram's ' Haunted Homes and Family Legends,' second series, p. 19. In the same volume, at p. 58, is a notice of another haunted house, Burton Agnes Hall, near Bridlington. Here the skull is that of a lady of the Boynton family, who was attacked and murdered by two ruffianly mendicants in the sixteenth century. Before she expired she implored her sisters to preserve her skull in the family mansion, which was then being built. This was not done at first, but finally the sisters were compelled to comply with this strange request by the noises, resembling claps of thunder, which resounded through the house every night until the skull was taken from the grave. Several attempts have been made to bury it, with the same result as at Bettiscombe. At p. 257 is a rather unsatisfactory account of a skull, said to be that of a murdered heiress, kept at Tunstead Farmhouse, near Chapel-en-le- Frith, Derbyshire. 'The Skull-House' is the title of one of Roby's 'Traditions of Lancashire' (second series, vol. ii. p. 287). The house referred to is VVorsley, or, as it is sometimes called, Wardley, Hall, an ancient building about seven miles west from Manchester. It was an old seat of the Downes family, of which a member who lived in the seventeenth cen- tury appears to have been in the habit of first getting more wine into his skull than was good for him, and then brawling with his brother sons of Belial in the London streets. In one of these nocturnal rambles he was killed, and his head was sent to his sisters as an announcement of his fate. They in vain tried to bury it, and were only able to secure respite from the hauutings by placing it in a niche on the staircase of the hall. The peculiarly horrible disturbances at Hinton Ampner Manor House in 1770 have been narrated in more than one collection of ghost stories. The fullest account is to be found in The Gentleman's Magazine for November and December, 1872. It is there mentioned that, when the house was being taken down (in 1797), " there was found by the workmen, under the floor of one of the rooms, a small skull, said to be that of a monkey; but the matter was never brought forward by any regular inquiry, or professional opinion resorted to as to tin- real nature of the skull." Mr. William Andrews is. I believe, the author of a book dealing with skull super- stitions ; MR. G. H. MARTIN may be able to find in it some information about Warbleton Priory. R. L. MORETON. Two pages of ' Rambles among the Hills, by Louis Jennings, are devoted to Warbleton