Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 4.djvu/572

 474 s. iv. DEC, 9, NOTES AND QUERIES, together, and dated 1539. Apparently the •entries in the first part of this register were copiedfrom some former register, and probably this occurred in 1597, for in that year pariah registers were directed to be " transcribed anew on parchment." .When it is remembered that Thomas Cromwell, the yicar - General, issued the order for keeping parish registers on 29 September, 1538, and that the civil, or legal, year at that time ended on 24 March, there appears to be no doubt that the original register at Farlington commenced in January, 1538/9, and that the errors in the present register are simply due to careless •division of the years when the register was transcribed. The correct date therefore of the baptism of Thomas Pouude would be 29 May, 1539, and that of his younger brother William, 24 May, 1540. ALFRED T. EVERITT. High Street, Portsmouth. BATHILDA (10th S. iv. 28, 93).—See 'D.N.B.,' iii. 404, where, however, there is no mention of her canonization by St. Nicholas (Pope $58-67). If MR. PLATT is correct, as I have no reason to doubt, her name should have been included in the list of English canon- ized saints, 10th S. iii. 25. She is mentioned in the Roman Martyrology on 26 January. JOHN B. WAINEWRIGHT. MINNISINKS (10th S. iv. 248).—In answer to DR. SPRINGETT'S question, I would say that theMinisink or Minnisink Indians were a small tribe on the Upper Delaware River, around the present Port Jervis, New York State, where the river, after a long course south- east, turns sharply south-west along the flank of the Kittatinny Mountains, which it breaks through at Delaware Water Gap, fifty or sixty miles below. It should be said, however, that Long- fellow's Indians are not infrequently Indians "in the aibstract," like love in Sydney Smith's Scotch flirtation, the names having little or no relation to exact tribal speciali- ties. ' Hiawatha' is an amusing instance : an_Ojibway legend with an Iroquois hero •(Hiawatha) and a Sioux heroine (Minne- haha); as if in the 'Nibelungenlied' we had, say, names like Theseus for Siegfried, and Morna or Savitri for Brunhilda or Chriem- hild, while the setting remained Teutonic. Longfellow's innocence of any further •scholarship as to the aborigines than a poet needed (and he certainly chose the happier part, for us) is shown by his favouring the •wholly groundless pronunciation Hee-a-wa- tha for his hero: the original form Ha-yo- wa-tha or Ha-yo-wen-tha shows that those who condensed it into " Hi-" intended the English, and not the continental, pronuncia- tion for the i. FORREST MORGAN. Hartford, Conn., U.S.A. "THAT is. HE WOULD HAVE" (10th S. iv. 409).—The Globe of 18 November contained the following:— " There is an interesting note in ' N. i Q." on a humorous device employed by early nineteenth- century song writers. It consisted in making a full-blooded assertion, and then contradicting it with words beginning, ' Thnt is, he would have." There seems to be some doubt as to the author who first employed this idea, but we think the editor of ' N. & Q.' is right in stating that it is taken from -the well-known poem beginning: ' I sing a doleful tragedy; Guy Faux, that prince of sinisters.' He might have added that these lines were by Hudson, the song writer, who, moreover, used it in a number of other songs. Hudson's com- positions till an octavo volume, but of the man himself we have never been able to obtain much information." H. W. U. LOOPING THE LOOP : FLYING OR CENTRI- FUGAL RAILWAY : WHIRL OF DEATH (10th S. iv. 65, 176, 333, 416).—I well remember having seen at the Polytechnic in Regent Street, about 1845, a very small iron railway having two loops, with a platform at each end (about 2 feet higher than the board to which the railway was screwed) and a train of three or four carriages, which went from start to finish without any mishap taking place. It was in the nature of a big tov. C. MASON. 29, Emperor's Gate, S.W. 'GENIUS BY COUNTIES' (10th S. iv. 287, 329).—I read in The Strand Magazine for August the article alluded to by ST. SWITHIN. The writer's statistics seemed to me to be based on too small a percentage of famous names. Perhaps, however, I had been spoilt by reading a work which goes into the subject in a very exhaustive manner. ST. SWITHIN and others, like myself, interested, will find 'A Study of British Genius,' by Havelock Ellis (Hurst & Blackett, Lond., 1904), a fascinating and_ suggestive book, of value both on the antiquarian and scientific side. Taking as a basis the names of 1,030 indi- viduals of pre-eminent genius from the pages of the ' Dictionary of National Biography,' the author has given us a summary or the local, and, so far as was possible, the bio- logical and hereditary influences bearing on their lives. The statistics of "genius by counties" are not the least fruitful part_of his inquiry. So far as I know, Mr. Ellis's work is the only one that bears on the geographical distribution of British genius,