Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 11.djvu/453

 ii s. XL JUNE 5, 1915.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

443

OXFORDSHIRE LANDED GENTRY (11 S. xi. 266, 346, 407). The Supplement to the Visitation of Oxfordshire in 1634, referred to by your correspondent MR. ROLAND AUSTIN, was printed in the Miscellanea G&nealogica et Heraldic^, Fourth Series, vol. v. p. 97. It contains thirty-five pedigrees and coats of arms. I see by a recent advertise- ment that it has been published separately by Messrs. Mitchell Hughes & Clarke, 140, Wardour Street. G. J. A.

TUNE THE OLD COW DIED OF "

(II S. xi. 248, 309). -I have always heard this associated with a fiddle. My real object, however, in writing is to inquire if MR. E. STAFFORD is correct in referring to Neil Gow as a piper.

Ye '11 'a heard o' famous Neil,

The lad that played the fiddle weel ;

I wat he was a dainty chiel,

And weel he lo'ed the whisky, ! Too well, in foct, because ho had to play a Farewell to Whisky.'

W. OTTRZON YBO. Richmond, Surrey.

CHANTRIES (US. xi. 322). ' The Eve of the Reformation,' by Cardinal Gasquet, contains a good deal of information about the relation between guilds and chantries.

M. H. DODDS.

Home House, Low Fell, Gateshead.

HEMBOROW (11 S. xi. 360). This appears very much like a variation of Heming- borough or Hemingbrough, the name of a village near Selby. " Heming " is a personal name of the Danish period. W. G.

0n

The Development of Arabic Numerals in Europe.

By G. F. Hill. (Oxford, Clarendon Press,

7.". 6d. net.)

FIVE years ago Mr. Hill read a remarkable paper on this subject to the Society of Antiquaries, which aroused considerable interest. He has now recast and expanded it until the original fifty-one tables of illustrations have been in- creased to sixty-four. He is amply justified in claiming that this is the first attempt in our language to treat the subject systematically ; though hardly less fascinating than the cognate subject of the origin of the alphabet, it has long waited for its sacer vales. We much wish that he had felt moved to pursue his researches even further, from Europe into Asia, and given us a complete monograph which would have traced the origin of the numerals to their cradle in India. As it is, Mr. Hill rigidly confines himself to the limits he has laid down for this work, and the story remains half told.

The object the writer has in view is to exhibit every occurrence of the digits previous to the year 1500. The earliest instance is that afforded by the " Boethian apices," the numbers used in a MS. of the Codex Vigilanus written in 976, which are almost identical in form with the so-called gobar or " dust " (written) figures of the Western Arabians. These again are essentially the same as the Indian figures which are believed to have been originally the initial letters of the Sanskrit names of the numerals. All this, however, lies- outside Mr. Hill's purview, and consistently with his plan he ignores the interesting researches- made by Woepcke, Bhau Daji, and Pihan in the last century, and more recently by Smith and Karpinski.

The next oldest exemplars, after the Boethian, are those found in a poem of Angilbert on Charle- magne, which belongs to the eleventh century; but it was not until the beginning of the century following that the Arabic numerals came into common use. All the instances of them that he has been able to collect from MS. sources in various lands the author displays in sixteen tables of admirable clearness. Next in sequence follow a large number of plates of epigraphical specimens, industriously collected from monu- mental sources, such as tombs, bells, coins, and pictures, down to 1596, some thousand instances in all. The numerals which have been most Protean in their changes and are least recogniz- able by the modern eye are 4 and 5.

We have nothing but praise for the immense pains and wide research with which Mr. Hill has brought together so complete a collection of these symbols ; and we are grateful to him for laying them before us in a manner so easy and comprehensible. We cannot but reiterate the hope that he will follow up the present work with a second part which will deal with the digits before they found their way to Europe.

The Poems of Pobert HerrkTc. Edited by F. W.

Moorman. (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 12s. M..

net.)

THIS edition is a reproduction of the 1648 text of the 'Hesperides' and the 'Noble Numbers,' col- lated with the text of the poems as some of them exist in MS. and with that in anthologies printed during Herrick's lifetime, or published in Playford's music-books. The most interesting part of the study of the text of Herrick is, perhaps, the com- parison between different copies of the 1648 edition, which show divergences at certain points. One of the first and most valued workers in this by-path of scholarship was the late W. F. Prideaux, who, at 10 S. iv. 482-3, gave readers of ' N. & Q.' the- results of his careful collation of two copies. The upshot of the examination as a whole seems to be to establish the fact, not that, as Dr. Grosart sur- mised, the type was kept standing, but that Her- rick went on correcting the text even after copies had been struck off, and insisted upon these being embodied in the book itself not relegated to a list of errata.

Col. Prideaux, in his collation, comments on the word "warty" in the line " Deane, or thy warty incivility," as "an odd misprint," the retention of which in Duridrennan's edition of Herrick he calls " a curious instance of devotion to textual accu- racy." The present editor, however, gives good reason for keeping " warty " on its own merits and