Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 3.djvu/104

 98

NOTES AND QUERIES. p* B. in. FEB. 4, m

quickly. One lad " chucked " his " taw " two or three yards in front, and the next chucked at the first taw with his taw, and so on. When one taw was hit, the owner followed on, getting two " chucks " in succession. When played with boulders it was called " chuck-bowder." Big rocks we called " torrs," the difference being that instead of " taw " to rhyme with " caw," we rolled the V in tor. thus " The High Tor" at Matlock Bath was "T' Heigh Torr," not "Heigh Taw," a fine, but clear distinction. This is not a contribution to the origin of " taw," but may be of some use. THOS. RATOLIFFE.

Worksop.

PUZZLE JUG (9 th S. iii. 49). I have had in my possession several of the puzzle jugs referred to by your correspondent. They are often to be met with in Yorkshire. The jugs I had were brown glazed earthenware. I have never seen one of so early a date as 1705. I know that some of these jugs and similar puzzle teapots were made as early as 1815 in Chesterfield, and probably were manufactured there at a much earlier date. I have one of these teapots in my possession. It has no lid ; the water is poured in at the bottom ; when full, turn it round and the water will pour from the spout. Various other puzzle earthenware articles of early manufacture are to be met with as tobacco- boxes, snuff-boxes, candlesticks, &c. which are ingeniously contrived. I am under the impression that the jug your correspondent refers to will be of Holland manufacture. CHARLES GREEN.

18, Shrewsbury Road, Sheffield.

Such are kept for sale at a shop on the Pantiles, Tunbridge Wells.

D. R. DOSSETOR.

HERALDIC (9 th S. iii. 50). I believe the two objections to be well founded, though I con- fess myself unable to refer to an authority I should be sceptical as to the correctness oi ermine on a banner ; and the arms proposed to be worked on the yacht flag would be a new coat, if any charges from the shield were omitted. I can, however, imagine a case in which this latter consideration might ex cusably be set aside. Did not the Dukes oj Brittany substitute another device on their banner for the hermines pleine of their shield JOHN HOBSON MATTHEWS.

Town Hall, Cardiff.

Ermine, without any charge, is the coat o Brittany, and appears, as a quartering, in the arras of several ancient English families.

GEORGE ANGUS.

ISLAND OF ICHABOE (9 th S. ii. 527). In the port of the proceedings of the Hamburg Geographical Society for 1891-2 some account s given by a recent visitor of Ichaboe and
 * he other islands that lie off the coast of the

)ay of Angra Pequena. Bare and unat- tractive, they are the home of countless sea- jirds, and a few white men are in perpetual occupation there, engaged in moving the ! ood but fish, and the men are dependent on
 * uano. Nature supplies little in the way of
 * he vessels that carry the guano for most of
 * he necessaries of existence. It would be hard

to imagine a more unenviable life. The one diversion seems to occur in the breeding season of the seals, when hundreds of these reatures are knocked over with cudgels, and silled for the sake of their skins.

T. P. ARMSTRONG. Putney.

Miss COLLIER (9 th S. ii. 528). Miss Jane (? Margaret) Collier assisted Miss Sarah Fielding to write * The Cry,' a new dramatic fable, London, 1750. She wrote 'An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting, with Proper Rules for the Exercise of that Pleasant Art,' &c., London, 1753 ; second edition, 1804. JOHN RADCLIFFE.

NOTES ON BOOKS, &o.

A New English Grammar, Logical and Historical.

By Henry Sweet, LL.D. Part II. (Oxford,

Clarendon Press.)

IT is only now, after an interval of six years due to other and perhaps more important avocations in the cause of Anglo-Saxon that Dr. Sweet's ela- borate grammar finds its completion. The former part, published in 1892, embraced the phonology and accidence ; this second part deals solely with the syntax. The points that at once strike us are the prominence he assigns to the spoken or collo- quial English as distinct from the literary or bookish speech, which, after all, is but a small part of the tongue, and the attention he gives to the subject of the order and stress of words in their bearing on syntax.

If Dr. Sweet has a fault, it is perhaps a tendency to an over-subtle analysis and excess of differen- tiation, as in his remarks on the use of the pluper- fect. He has a predilection, too, for a nomen- clature of his own, resulting in such uncouth (if convenient) nonce-words as "tag-order," "end- verb," and " front-adverb." In some of his pro- nouncements on colloquial proprieties we venture to hold a different opinion from the author. We cannot, for instance, see that "to keep fowl" and " written in blank verse " are less correct locutions than "fowls" and " verses " respectively. Nor do we think that " bid him come in," and " well- spoken " in the sense of plausible, are to be ranked as obsolete phrases, though Dr. Sweet says they are. It seems a pity, moreover, to set aside the