Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 4.djvu/86

 66 NOTES AND QUERIES. [io* s. iv. JULY 22,1905. x. 366 (November, 1902) Old Humphrey's account in 1843 of the Centrifugal Railway. At 9th S. xi. 337 MR. ABRAHAMS further quoted the description of the railway given in a handbill in the Granger Collection at the Guildhall, and referred to an advertisement in The Times of 8 July, 1842. an- nouncing the opening of the Centrifugal Railway at the exhibition in Great Windmill Street. The " Patent Signal Telegraph " was also shown in 1842. We ourselves witnessed the Centrifugal Railway in action about the period named, 1842-3.] THE AMIR OF AFGHANISTAN'S TITLE.—A short time ago an Irish member of Parlia- ment, of inquiring mind and philological tendencies, asked the Secretary of State for India whether he was aware that the Amir had been erroneously described as Siraj-ul- millat-wa-ud-din in a Parliamentary Paper; whether he should have been set out as Siraju-'lmillat wa'd-din: and whether he was aware that the name Habibulla is a con- traction for Habibu Allah. Now, although any member of the House of Commons is prepared to assume the responsibilities of an empire at a day's notice, our Constitution does not provide that he should master the intricacies of an Oriental language in the same brief space of time, and the Secretary of State, being unversed in the tongues, was compelled to have recourse to a "high authority," who, in guarded language, in- formed him that the transliteration of the Amir's title indicated by the hon. member might be considered more correct, as a matter of scholarship, than that adopted by the Government of India, but that the transliteration of the Amir's name indicated by the hon. member was less correct than that adopted by the Government of India. It will be observed that the "high authority " cautiously refrained from going beyond the comparative degree. Had he wished to say what -was "quite correct," he would have informed the Secretary of State that, as a matter of scholarship, the Amir's title was Siraju-'l-millati wa-'d-dlni, and that in collo- quial Arabic it was Siraju-'l-milla wa-'d-din. the title signifying Lamp of Religion and the Faith. Our ancestors of the days of Sir Roger Dowler would doubtless have called his Majesty (until recently his Highness) Sir Roger Miller Deane. The name of the Amir is, of course, Habibu-llah, which means the Beloved of Allah. It is satisfactory to know that no further action will be taken in this important matter. W. F. PKIDEAUX. "RISING OF THE LIGHTS." (See 8th S. vi. 308, 415, 516.) —The contributors who, at these references, fully explain the meaning and historical use of this phrase, treat it as obsolete ; but, like many olu English expres- sions, it survives in the United States. In Miss Alice Hegan Rice's wonderfully suc- cessful Kentucky story 'Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch,' first printed in England in 1902, the resourceful heroine, as she critically surveys the horse in a fit, exclaims: "I'll tell you what's the matter with him: his lights is riz." And she proceeds to administer as medicine " what appeared to be a large marble," and which she explains to be a camomile pill, which strikingly recalls the old-fashioned remedies for this complaint, described at the last reference by MR. ASTLEY. ALFRED F. ROBBINS. [MR. ASTLEY treated the expression as current.] OLORENSHAW FAMILY.—I shall be glad to correspond with any one who is collecting particulars of this family. I have a few notes, which I am desirous of augmenting. JOHN T. PAGE. West Haddon, Northamptonshire. JACOBITE REBELS.—In the British Museum is a ' List of Persons engaged in the Rebel- lion in Scotland, showing their Places of Abode, their Present Place of Residence, 1764.' The reference is Add. MS. 19,796. In my own MSS. I have lists of the political prisoners transported in 1716 to Virginia, Jamaica, Maryland, South Caro- lina, Antigua, and St. Christopher's. The total number of them is 623. My collections show that in 1747 a still larger number of rebels were sent to the Leeward Islands, Jamaica, Maryland, and Barbadoes. I have no doubt that many Americans at the present day, if they knew that their emigrant ancestors had been Jacobites, would be proud of the fact. GERALD FOTHEEGILL. 11, Brussels Road, New Wandsworth. JOHN JULIUS ANGERSTEIN.—The 'D.N.B.' (i. 416) says of this worthy that he was born in 1735, was of Russian extraction, and at the age of fifteen came first to England. Some account of his birth and parentage will be found in the following paragraph, copied from a biography of Catherine II. in The Lady's Mayazine for January, 1836, "partly translated from the French of the Duchess d'Abrante"s " :— " Such was the degeneracy in those days that she [the Empress Elizabeth] was the mother of several illegitimate children, who were taken privately from the palace. One of these, the son of a very handsome Englishman, a Russia merchant-, resident at St. Petersburg!], was noted in England for his great munificence and noble person, and as a princely patron of the tine arts. His name will