Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 1.djvu/232

 224

NOTES AND QUERIES.

[9 th S. I. MAR. 19, '98.

' Pickwick ' will soon be a thing of the past. It was here that Bob Sawyer studied medicine with Mr. Benjamin Allen, and here that Mr. Pickwick was entertained on that memorable occasion when Mrs. Raddle, turning rusty, raked out the kitchen fire and locked up the kettle. Dickens's description of this street as a place where, "if a man wished to abstract himself from the world and remove himself from the reach of temptation, he should by all means go," is as applicable to the street now as it was then. " The whole Borough district," says a contemporary, "swarmed with quaint old places more or less identified with Dickens and his creations, but they are gradually going one by one, and even what still remains of the old Marshalsea prison is soon to be swept away by the London County Council's Tabard Street improvement scheme." FREDERICK T. HIBGAME.

"HE GOT UP IN HIS SITTING." This CX-

pression is common on the borders of Wales, and means, in ordinary English, " he raised himself, from lying down, into a sitting posture." The phrase is a literal translation of a Welsh idiom, "Fe gododd 'n i istedd" (colloquially), yet it is used by people who cannot speak or understand Welsh, and is adopted even by English people who have long resided on the Welsh border. It puzzled me immensely when I first heard it.

JOHN HOBSON MATTHEWS. Town Hall, Cardiff.

" PUNG." This is a common word in vogue with New England newspapers and an every- day expression in the mouths of the Yankee folk, whether of high or low degree, though seldom mentioned when the temperature rises to the 90 mark or thereabouts. It denotes a mean -looking or cheaply made sleigh or sledge, particularly the primitive kind formed by the energy of the farmer-lad from rough boards. Inmates of cities also apply the word to the large models going on steel runners, let by the day or hour by stable keepers, seating ten or twenty persons, and capable of withstanding hard usage from a merry crowd of children or those of older growth bent on a winter moonlight outing. The W rces ter, Webster, and ' Century ' dic- tionaries are all silent as to the derivation of the word. Is it of local English origin? It has not, I fancy, an Indian sound. Possibly our so-called Pilgrims (as remarkable for their ignorance as for their virtues) acquired it during their dismal sojourn in Holland. But against that is the fact that the word is rarely to be met with in New York State, where the descendants of the old early Dutch

immigrants abound. It might, however, simply be a corruption of the old nautical word punt, a flat-bottomed boat, thus matching the singular fashion of calling a stage-coach a barge on the part of the rural New Eng- lander, betraying his sailor origin.

J. G. C. Boston, Mass.

THE INCLINATION OF THE EARTH'S Axis. In an interesting article, contributed to Long- man's Magazine for March, on * The Seasons of the Year,' and why there are seasons in tropical as well as in temperate climates, Mr. Grant Allen begins by expressing some fear of " that inconvenient person the astro- nomical critic " with regard to his use of the word year, but pleads that he is not con- cerned with the different kinds of year, which differ in length only by a few minutes. On that point explanation was unnecessary; it is understood that a "year" without quali- fication signifies a tropical year, on which the seasons depend. But later on he falls into an error which is not small in amount. "Every one knows," he says, "that winter

and summer depend upon the fact that

the earth's axis is not perpendicular to the plane in which the earth moves round the sun, but slightly inclined to it." This slight inclination amounts to 66 32'. Mr. Grant Allen was thinking, not of the plane of the earth's orbit, but of the perpendicular to that plane. But even 23 28' is scarcely a slight angle. W. T. LYNN.

A DUTCHMAN'S SMOKING. In 'Knicker- bocker's History of New York,' book ii. chap, i., one reads concerning the building of a church at Rotterdam :

" At length, having occupied twelve good months

in puffing and paddling, having smoked five

hundred and ninety-nine pipes, and three hun- dredweight of the best Virginia tobacco, my

great-grandfather laid the corner-stone of the

church."

Now if the manner of Diedrich be adopted i and the reader proceed to "philosophize" upon the facts stated ; premising, as to any given weight of tobacco, that the number of charges and the capacity of the pipes are interdependent the larger the bowl and the fewer the charges, the smaller the bowl and the more numerous the charges; reckoning, too, sixteen ounces to the pound, twenty-five charges to the ounce (to bring the calculations to an every-day basis), and sixteen hours to the smoking day; not de- ducting anything for mealtimes and the very considerable time spent in churches ; we arrive at the following remarkable figures.