Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 3.djvu/292

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NOTES AND QUERIES.

s. m. APRIL 15,

printing, are to be found Spanish transla- tions of a number of letters written from Surat in January-February, 1613, by mem- bers of the E.I.C.'s Tenth Voyage, among them being one from Patrick Copland to John Randall, minister of St. Andrew Hub- bard, Little Eastcheap, London, giving a short account of the famous fight of the Dragon and Hosiander with the Portuguese fleet in Swally roads. These letters were sent to England by land ; but the bearer died near Bagdad, a Portuguese emissary stole them, and they reached King Philip's hands. What became of the originals I do not know. In Purchas (part i. p. 466) will be found an abbreviated account of the voyage above referred to.

DONALD FERGUSON. 5, Bedford Place, Croydon.

ANCIENT BEE - LORE. -The following is a cutting from the British Bee Journal for 16 March, p. 110 :

"A Bee Journal reader kindly sends us the fol- lowing translation from an ancient Saxon MS. in Corpus Christi College, Oxford. It is headed ' Saxon Leechdoms,' vi. p. 385, and reads thus :

'FOR CATCHING A SWARM OF BEES.

' Take some earth, throw it with thy right hand under thy right foot, and say, " I take under foot ; I am trying what earth avails for everything in the world, and against spite and against malice, and against the mickle tongue of man and against pleasure."

' Throw over them some gravel where they swarm, and say,

" Set ye my ladies, sink,

Sink ye to earth down,

Never be so wild

As to the wood to fly.

Be ye as mindful of my good as every man is of rural and estate." J:

CELER ET AUDAX.

'DICTIONARY OF NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY': GENERAL MURRAY. A few days ago I had occasion to consult the thirty-ninth volume of ' D.N.B.,' when I observed two small errors in the notice of General the Hon. James Murray, and as they have not yet been pointed out in ' N. & Q.' it may be well to mention them. The portrait alluded to in the notice is not "by J. S. Weele," but by S. J. Neele. I have a copy of it (small oval, profile) which I bought about fifteen years ago from the late Mr. Graves, Pall Mall, who told me that it came from the Blenheim Col- lection. It had previously belonged to Horace Walpole. Printed underneath the portrait are the words, " London, Pub d Nov r 15 th 1782, by S. J. Neele, No. 352, near Exeter 'change, Strand." November, 1782, was the first month of Murray's trial by court-martial. Above the

publisher's name and address are the follow- ing words, in Horace Walpole's handwriting, " Defeated in America in the reign of Geo. 2 d, Governor of Minorca when taken in 1782, but in general honorably acquitted." The defeat alluded to is the engagement at Sillery, when Murray took out the garrison of Quebec to attack the French, who were in greatly superior numbers ; and the remark corresponds with the passage in Walpole's ' Letters,' " got into a mistake and a morass, and was enclosed, embogged, and defeated." A harsh judgment !

The other error in the notice is a reference to the records of the " 15th Cambridgeshire Regiment," which should be the 15th York- shire East Riding Regiment. Murray was a lieutenant-colonel in the 15th Foot when he commanded a brigade at the battle of Quebec, and although he was not near Wolfe when that general died, West pressed him for per- mission to depict him in his picture of the death of Wolfe. Murray refused. "No, no," he said : " I was not by : I was leading the left."

Carlyle of Inveresk met Murray on more than one occasion, and describes him as " a very acute and sensible man "; but the ' Auto- biography' (p. 423) is not among the refer- ences in the notice in the 'D.N.B.' Nor is mention made of a shield taken by Murray as a trophy from one of the gates of Quebec, which is displayed in the town hall of Hastings. W. S.

"COTERMINOUS." Meeting in Mr. Wake- man's 'Introduction to the History of the Church of England ' (fifth ed., published last year, p. 463) with this word, which should evidently be conterminous, I turned to the ' H.E.D.' to see whether any other cases of that form were given. With the remark that it is "improperly formed," it quotes two, one of which happens to be from the first edition of Sir John Herschel's 'Astronomy' (1833), forming one of Lardner's " Cabinet Cyclo- paedia," and afterwards enlarged into the ' Outlines of Astronomy.' At p. 205 of that edition we read, "Owing to the different dis- tribution of land and sea in the two hemi- spheres, zones of climate are not co-terminal with zones of latitude" When co- or con- is used for cum- as a prefix, it should take the former form before a vowel, and the latter or some other form before a consonant. Thus, as instances of the former, coadjutor, coagu- late, coeval, coequal; of the latter, concoct, concord, concrete, confound, congregate, connote, consonant, contemporary, conterminous, con- tribute. Other forms appear in colloquy,