Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 4.djvu/240

 312 NOTES AND QUERIES. [Sr-s.iv.oer.u.m with forgery, suggests that " they [the papers lie says Ware forged] may have been written for him [the father] by others in a contem- porary handwriting." Apparently feeling that, after all, his con- victions, thoughts, speculations, and sug- gestions were equally valueless, he concludes, after deliberately heading this division 'A Forger and his Method,' by saying: " It matters, however, not much whether my theory of the entries among Sir James Ware's collections be true or not, be accepted or rejected. In any case the documents are spurious, which is the important matter." Exactly so. The whole charge of forgery against Robert Ware is a baseless " theory," without a shadow of proof to support it, in- vented by Father Bridgett, as he finally con- fesses, who, after declaring the documents " forgeries," Robert Ware a " forger," and the eminent writers who for two centuries have used his collections "dupes," tells us it matters not whether his " theory " be " true or not." See 'Rome's Tactics' by Dean Goode, with introduction by Dr. Bullinger, 1893. G. M. M. Black Jews (9th S. iv. 68).—Dr. Burnell's note on p. 70 of vol. lxx. of the Hakluyt Society's series (Linschoten) runs as follows : "The Jews had to leave Cranganore when it became a Portuguese possession, and settled in the native town of Cochin. They now live chiefly at Mattanceri (to the south of Cochin), and at Cen<5a- mangalam. They are almost entirely Sephardim from Bagdad and other parts, and even from Europe. There are also a few Ashkenasim. The black Jews are of mixed race." Arthur T. Prinule. Cheltenham. The Surname Morcom (9th S. iv. 148).-- Like many other place-names in the " West Countrie," the name Morcom is manifestly Celtic; the derivation is either Mor-Cwm, the hollow by the sea, or Mawr-Cwm, the great hollow. Malcolm, being presumably a Gaelic word, may have the same roots and be practically the same name. But even if so it is hardly correct to speak of Cornish and Gaelic variations as phonetic alterations of each other. Frank Penny, LL.M. Fort St. George. The above surname may be derived from any of the following sources: Afor (Gad- helic), mawr (Cymro-Celtic), great; muir (Scot.), a tract of waste land, heath, a moor ; mor (Cymro-Celtic), mare (Latin), the sea ; com, an abbreviation of combe (Celto-Saxon), cwm (Welsh), a bowl-shaped valley, which would give, The great bowl-shaped valley, the valley on the moor, or the valley near the sea. John Radcliffe. The Authorship of ' The Red, White, and Blue ' (9th S. iv. 164, 231).—I returned from the Crimea in 1856 in a transport containing a party of " navvies " who had been employed on the Balaklava Railway. These worthies assembled on the forecastle of an evening and beguiled the time with songs and choruses. The ditty most in vogue was " Britannia, the pride of the ocean." The cry of "Dree cheers for the red, white, and blu-eh " never seemed to pall on the ears of the patriotic performers, and there was cer- tainly no flavour of Americanism about any part of the performance. The song was new to me. I observe that the song is procurable at Sheard's, 192, High Holborn, and is num- bered 531-2 in the'Musical Bouquet' This would probably be the original edition. J. j. J. Trade=Road (9th S. iv. 186, 256).—It is melancholy to see the way in which trade, tread, and trod have been mixed up. Really, correspondents ought to try to master the different gradations of the English strong verbs. See the confusion which has arisen from a want of ability to discriminate between the various vowel-sounds. We are told that trade is the old pronunciation of tread, and this may be true enough ; but then, at the time when tread was pronounced as trade, it so happened that trade was pronounced as trand, with an as in boa. The words are differently spelt for the reason that they were differently pronounced ; and they were dif- ferently pronounced because they had dif- ferent origins. Yet all is clear to any one who knows any- thing at all about the A.-S. vowel-sounds ; and it is rather hard that I should have to explain all over again the very word trade, which is already explained in my 'Principles of English Etymology,' First Series, p. 181. The fact is simply that the A.-S. trednn, to tread, is a strong verb, with the pt. t. tra>d, and the pp. troa-en. If this verb had been accurately preserved, we should have had a modern English verb tread (still in use), with the pt. t. trade, and the pp. trodden. Un- fortunately, the pt. t. is obsolete. In other words, there are three distinct grades, viz., tread, trade, and trod, all of them capable of producing substantives. From the first grade we have tread as a sb.; ex., " Thou canst hear the tread of travellers " (' 1 Hen. IV.,' II. ii. 35). From the second grade we have the sb. trade, a trodden path, with the well-known