Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 10.djvu/243

 9>s.x. SEPT. 20, 1902.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

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their petition, which is cited in the letters patent, that the manufacture of this yarn " is a new invention never practised here before, and that they have at their great cost and charges erected a bucking house, fitted and prepared a whiteing ground, brought several workmen out of Germany educated and skilled in makeing the said spinnall, and hazarded several hundred pounds' worth of brown yarne to try the experiments whether the air, water, and other materialls used for doing the same, would be proper and effectuall here in England, which has oeen found fully to answer their expectation, and to be nothing inferior to those in Germany, whereby a great quantity of the flax and yarne of the growth and manufacture of this our kingdome may be inployed which is now supplyed from beyond the seas." "

A patent (No. 289) in precisely similar terms was granted to these two persons on 22 Feb- ruary following, a circumstance that I am unable to account for, except on the theory that there was some informality in the sealing or the enrolment of the first patent.

I am conscious that this does riot exactly answer MR. GREGORY'S question, but it throws some light upon the matter. There is no description of the invention, as the inventor was not in those early days required to furnish a " specification " of his patent. The business or calling of the patentees is not stated, nor is there any indication of the place where their business was carried on, out I should think it was probably in the eastern suburbs of London. R. B. P.

"CoND" (9 th S. x. 126). In the 'Gentle- man's Dictionary,' London, 1705, the word cond as a noun is not given, but to con, cons, conning, conned, to cond, conds, cpnding, to cun, and cunning appear as words in common use in connexion with steering a ship. To give only a few examples. Under the word ' Quarter-masters ' it is said that " they are also to keep their watch duly, in conding the ship." Under the word ' Starboard ' we find " in conning a ship " ; and under the word 4 Steer,' " to steer as one is bidden or conned."

W. S.

SIR WALTER SCOTT AND SIR DAVID WILKIE (9 th S. x. 129). Though a constant reader of the writings of Sir Walter Scott, both in prose and poetry, and yielding to none in my admiration of both, yet 1 cannot call to mine any pictorial illustrations after Sir Davic Wilkie, who was born in 1785. No one coulc have been better fitted to depict the many scenes of humble life with which Scott abounds He certainly painted, when the guest of Sir Walter at Abbotsford in 1817, a picture callec 'The Abbotsford Family Picture, representing Scott as a farmer surrounded by his family Sophia Scott as a milkmaid with a pail on

ler head, of which there is a small engraving. ! saw the original painting, one of no great ize, in the Edinburgh Exhibition some years ago.

Sir David Wilkie died at sea, 1 June, 1841, and there is a picture by Turner representing lis coffin being lowered into the deep, for he did not meet with the " heavy-shotted ham- mock-shroud," as Tennyson calls it (' In VIeinoriam,' vi.). On the base of his statue s inscribed by Lord Mahon as an epitaph :

A Life too short for Friendship, not for Fame. JOHN PICKFORD, M.A.

Newbourne Rectory, Woodbridge.

PERIWINKLE (9 th S. x. 128). The existence of such homonyms as celidony, cornelian; jade, and sardine makes one chary of dis- illowing a precious stone called periwinkle. The ordinary interpretations of the word, tiowever, seem to suffice in the quotations so far adduced, save in the second and third, where the influence*of the Latin ^permncere, to surpass, is too strong to be disregarded. In the Harleian MS. poem and in Lydgate the plant is, of course, referred to ; but the last two quotations contain the crux solvable, I think, zoologically.

The gasteropodous periwinkle obtains its present name, we are told, through the cor- ruption of the wordpinewincla i.e., " mussel- winkle," which evidently differentiated this kind of winkle from others. Hence one suspects that the term was originally applied to Purpura lapillus, a dog-whelk, or "dog- periwinkle," for in Scotland the periwinkle is known as a whelk. This creature infests and damages mussel-beds, whereas the ordi- nary periwinkle is vegetarian in habit. More- over, Purpura secretes a fluid which turns blue on exposure to air, as is well known, and this may have had some bearing on the assimilation of its popular name to that of the flower.

The true periwinkle would, then, be a whelk ; and, after the obscuration of the first portion of the word, by analogy one expects to find other marine gasteropoda with convoluted shells of moderate size included loosely in the term. That this was really the case may be seen in Peacham's directions for the portrayal of Thetis ('The Gentleman's Exercise,' 1612, p. 124). She should be limned, he says, as

" a Ladie of something a browne complexion, her heire dishevld about her shoulders, upon her head a Coronet of Periwinckle and Escallop shelles, in a mantle of Sea-water greene."

Now, close as its reluctant association with the insinuating hairpin may be at times, one