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NOTES AND QUERIES, [ii s. vn. APRIL 19, 1913.

at present to go fully into the matter ; but if any one is interested in the subject, I might lend him my hasty notes and news- paper cuttings. J. W. SCOTT.

20, Paradise Place, Leeds.

[The latest edition of ' The Encyclopaedia Britannica ' says (a.v. Washington, George) : " The genealogical researches of Mr. Henry E. Waters seem to have established the connexion of the family with the Washingtons of Sulgrave, Northamptonshire." A notice of Mr. Waters's discoveries was contributed to The Athenceum of 19 Oct., 1889, by Dr. Augustus Jessopp, and commented on in ' N. & Q.' in November and December of the same year (7 8. viii. 406, 456). General John Meredith Bead printed in The Athenceum of 24 March, 1894, a long account of his researches on " another line in the descent of General Washington " ; and Washington's ancestry was also discussed in the review of his collected writings which appeared in The Athenceum of 7 April, 1894.]

EABTH-EATING (11 S. vi. 290, 351, 397, 514 ; vii. 98, 155). Humboldt's ' Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America,' ch. xxiv. (" Bonn's Library " edition, vol. ii. pp. 495-504), has this passage :

" While the waters of the Orinoco and its tributary streams are low, the Ottomacs subsist on fish and turtles .... When the rivers swell,

fishing almost entirely ceases During the

period of these inundations, which last two or three months, the Ottomacs swallow a prodigious quantity of earth."

Further details are given of this eclible earth, as well as accounts of earth-eaters in various quarters of the world.

KUMAGUSU MlNAKATA. Tanabe, Kii, Japan.

SIR EDWARD HITCHINS (US. vii. 229). Will a reference to the arms help ? Burke in the ' General Armory ' gives for " Hit chins, co. Oxford": Sa., a castle arg. Crest, a castle arg. Another crest : out of a mural coronet a garb, on the top a bird perched ppr. There is a municipal savour about the mural coronet.

S. A. GRUNDY-NEWMAN, F.S.A.Scot.

Walsall.

'Conns' AND GRAY'S 'ELEGY' (11 S. vii. 206, 277). It is rather curious that Cowper in a letter to Joseph Hill, written in October, 1765 (Letter III., Hayley's ed., vol. i. p. 38), misquotes and spoils Gray's stanza, giving it as

Full many a gem of purest ray serene,

The deep unfathorn'd caves of ocean bear,

Full many a rose is born to blush unseen And waste its fragrance on the desert air.

J. E. LATTOX PICKERING. Inner Temple Library.

Local Government : the Story of the Kintfs

Highivay. By Sidney and Beatrice Webb.

(Longmans & Co.)

IN this admirable book Mr. and Mrs. Webb add yet another to the many public services they have rendered. They are, indeed, justified in supposing that it has an interest, as a study in administra- tion, not only for the student of sociology, but also for the general reader. We would recommend it, for example, to the jaded novelist desperately threshing his brain to find some unhackneyed plot or incident, for the divers dangers of the roads at different times have hardly been used to their full capacity as occasion for catastrophe or means of complication ; nor has all been made that might be of the scenes up and flown England when strings of galloping horses daily carried the catch of fish inland from the sea-coast, and innumerable droves of cattle, sheep, geese, and turkeys trampled the bottomless ways which at last converge upon London.

The first chapter mere outline though it neces- sarily is, describing the nature and use of the King's Highway up to the sixteenth century is one of the most interesting. It took many generations before the word " highway " came to mean what it means to us ; originally it signified no more than a right of passage on the part of the public, and a duty to keep the passage open on the part of some local authority originally the Manor.

No making of the road was considered necessary, but where the "good passage" was a much fre- quented one the ground tended, especially in winter, to become impassable, and so a certain amount of labour and material must be annually ex- pended upon it, merely that it might not be closed ; and the story related here is, through many chap- ters, that of the methods by which, and the authori- ties by whom, labour and material were procured and applied, the whole long series of attempts to solve a knotty problem being, until the advent of Macadam, vitiated more or less by the false theory that travellers must conform themselves to what was good for the roads, and contribute, not in- directly, but directly, to their maintenance, partly in a positive sense, as by the tolls paid on the turn- pike roads, partly in a negative sense by submitting to troublesome regulations intended to ensure the least possible detriment being done to the track left open for public use.

From 1555 when the first statutory organization of the upkeep of the roads took place to the end of the following century we get parochial adminis- tration, controlled through various devices by the justices and by Quarter Sessions. These were the clays of the unpaid activity of the surveyors of highways, appointed annually by each parish from among the smaller sort of parishioners above the status of labourers, and commissioned to exact from the inhabitants of the parish teams and labour or a money composition for these in proportion to the size of their holdings, for six days' work on the roads in a year.

Incompetence, fraud, and negligence despite all the pressure that Quarter Sessions were able to bring to bear ran everywhere riot, and reduced the roads to an intolerable badness, especially when the use of wheeled vehicles began to be