Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 9.djvu/502

 412 NOTES AND QUERIES. r.i2s.ix.Nov.i9,io2i. Prof. Stockley's wealth of quotation, con- fining himself almost wholly to Shake- speare for his literary illustrations, and referring mainly to Johnson's * Dictionary ' for his standard of pronunciation (he does not always agree with " the great lexi- cographer"), the range of his vocabulary gives great interest to his work. Many of the words dealt with by Prof. Stockley are dealt with by Nares too, and in nearly every case the changes noted in their accentuation are the same, though there are a few exceptions to this. A comparison of Prof. Stockley's articles with the corre- sponding portion of Nares gives additional interest to both. Nares shows that the changes noted by Prof. Stockley are evidence of an almost universal tendency in our language ; Prof. Stockley supplies what Nares wants in the way of illustrative quotations, and shows that the older pronunciation of many words survived in good writers somewhat longer than one would have supposed from what Nares says of them. C. C. B. GLEANING BY THE POOR (12 S. ix. 70, 112, 136, 157, 216, 256). In the Chinese ' Book of Odes,' the compilation by Confucius of the poems, none of which was produced later than in the sixth century B.C., we read : There are some sheaves forgotten and here some ears neglected. ; they shall all be for the widow. This is quite in accordance with the Con- fucian ' Book of Rites,' wherein the so- called Helpless People of Four Sorts young orphans, old childless persons, old widowers and old widows are entitled to communal support. The ancient Peru- vians appear to have maintained a very ex- quisite regulation in this matter. Mr. C. Reginald Enock, in his ' The Lure of the Pacific,' 1913, pp. 200-202, quoting Garci- lasso's ' Royal Commentaries of the Incas,' writes : They also established a regular order in the tilling and contivating of the land. They first tilled the fields of the sun; then those of the widows, orphans, aged, and sick, for all these persons were classed as poor, and as such, the Ynca emperor ordered that their fields should be tilled for them. In each village, or in each ward if the village was large, there were men deputed to look after the lands of persons who weie classed as poor. These officers of the village superintended the ploughing, sowing and harvesting ; and at such times they went up into towers the night before, built for the purpose, and, after blowing through a trumpet or shell to secure attention, cried with a loud voice that on such a day such and such lands of the poor would be I tilled, warning those whose duty it might be"Tto repair thither. If the poor had no seed it was provided from the Government stores. The land of soldiers who were employed in the wars were also tilled in this way, like those of widows and orphaLS, for wives whose husbands were serving" in the wars were looked upon as widows during their absence. After the lands of the poor and incapacitated had been attended to the people cultivated their own holdings and rendered mutual assistanceito each other ; and the last to receive such was the curaca. Was there any favouritism or corrup- tion shown in these operations or " graft " setup ? " In the time of the Emperor Huayna Capac a superintendent in the province of Chachapoyas was hanged because he caused the land of a curaca,. who was a relation of his, to be tilled before that of a poor widow." In the ' Encyclopaedia Britannica,' 1 Ittu ed., vol. xxvi., p. 887, the following state- ment occurs : Doubtless the flail was evolved from the early method of using the stick. . . . It was known to the Japanese from the earliest times, and was prob- ably used in conjunction with the stripper, an instrument fashioned very much like a large comb. , with the teeth made of hard wood and pointing upwards. The straw after being reaped was brought to this and combed through by hand, the heads being drawn off and afterwards thrashed on the thrashing-floor by the flail. At the present dav just such an implement, known as a " heckle," is used for combing the bolls or heads off flax or for straightening the fibre in the after treatment. The Japanese flail, however, must have been of a foreign origin, as is evident from its native appellation karasao,. or " foreign, rod." The stripper of the foregoing de- scription called inakogi was invented by a provincial of Idzumi or Yamato in the seven- teenth century (Namikawa, ' Idzumi Shi ' ; Saikwaku, ' Nihon Eitaigura,' 1688, tome v., ch. iii . ). Ace ording to Terashima' s ' Wakan Sansai Dzue,' 1713, tome xxxv. : Anciently the Japanese used to separate the ears from the straw of wheat and rice by squeezing them, one after another with two small bamboo sticks peculiarly strung together [so as to operate like a pair of forceps] which very tiresome work formed, a privilege of the widow. Since the recently invented stiipper, consisting of several tens of large bamboo nails invertedly planted in one row upon a four-legged bar, proved ten times as effective as the squeezing stick, all the widows came to lose their employment, whence its vulgar name Gokedaoshi (Widow-feller.) This record would seem somewhat to- verify VALE OF AYLESBUBY'S opinion (ante p. 157) that the causes which have led to tl decline in gleaning seem to be mechanical and economic rather than, anything in the way of legal obstruction. KUMAGTJSTJ MlNAKATA. Tanabe, Kii, Japan. '