Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 6.djvu/234

 192 NOTES AND QUERIES. [9* s. vi. SEPT. s, im not purchase books in anything like the number that they do at our national library. I believe something like 4,000/. a year is spent in acquiring olu books. How there can be still any they have not got is truly a marvel. Notwithstanding that a great librarian has given the authority of his name to the statement extensively advertised that the Paris library is the largest in the world, I still believe that the British Museum library is the largest. ME. MASON has got to the point where he gets or does not get the book he asked for, but not to that where the reader asks for twenty. One day my door ticket registered seventeen books, titles, <fec., all copied out from my tickets by the librarian. It was full. The librarian pointed this out to me as he wrote the seventeenth, with the remark, "I suppose you will not ask for any more to-day." I felt a great culprit. Last year in the Large Room at the British Museum I had about a hundred books out on the table at one time for weeks. In a month I got through as much as I could have done in six but for this. The only inconvenience I felt was that 1 had not also the 25,000 reference books in 'the Reading Room itself so near to hand. At the Biblio- theque Nationale there are only some two or three thousand books of reference. The British Museum ticket system is far superior. I saw that I could have abstracted a pam- phlet with the Paris system much more easily (if it could be done at all) than with the British 'Museum system. At the Bibliotheque Nationale Spartan simplicity, as befits a republican country prevails. You must not use the library " as a lounge." Accordingly we have plenty o wood—hard seats, ana no casters to the chairs and all the same height, and for me all too low. The result of the British Museum lounge system is that numbers of foreigner prefer the comfort and facilities of the Britisl Museum to their experiences of their own country. Should the French ever think o the British Museum system, it will pleas them to know that it was devised by an Italian known as Antonio Panizzi. I doub if any Englishman would have thought o making you comfortable whilst reading in library, especially in early days, wher readers were looked upon as a nuisance. RALPH THOMAS. "INUNDATE" (9th S. v. 395, 497; vi. 5. 112).—Since LORD ALDENHAM quotes Shake speare in favour of demonstrate, it may be as •ell to put side by side with his quotation nother from ' Henry V.,' To demonstrate the life of such a battle —where, curiously enough, we have what is ndoubtedly the modern pronunciation. Most of your correspondents somewhat miss the purport of my original note, which vas to determine, first, the direction in whlcn he standard of pronunciation is to be looked or. Unfortunately, in the march of events, tymology is driven to the wall, and it is useless to drag it put in order to uphold a >articular pronunciation. The ' H.E.D. pur- >orts to be an historical dictionary, and ite unction is to register facts. I have ventured to suggest that it has frequently put in the oremost rank pronunciations which are practically obsolete ; and their survival in sxpected, is no answer to the indictment. I have often had occasion to observe how differences in pronunciation commonly pass unnoticed. The average ear is so little trained to notice sounds that the widest differences sometimes escape observation. The most extreme case that has come under my notice is that of a certain admiral who always miscalls the name of another admiral, who happens to be my brother-in-law. He knows all the members of the family well, and must have heard and used that name thousands of times, and yet to his dying day he will continue to mispronounce it. Will LORD ALDENHAM ask some of his ac- quaintance about that word demonstrate? There are some men who will continue to use the pronunciation familiar to them in their youth, but I should be surprised if nine out of ten people of middle age did not say they had heard and used demonstrate long before 1885. HOLCOMBE INGLEBY. Heacham Hall, Norfolk. In the second volume of this Series, p. 103, MR. JAMES PLATT told us that Spalatro or Spalato should be accented on the first syllable, and he now repeats what he then said. Unless it be the local pronunciation, about which I cannot speak, he is, I think, wrong. Of course, I take it as an Italian word, derived from Spalatum, or, according to Dr. W. Smith, Spolatum. I have nowhere met with Spalatrum. The correct form would therefore appear to be Spalato, which is invariably employed by Sir Henry Wotton, Izaak Walton, Thomas Fuller in his ' Church History of Britain,' and other writers of the period, when speaking of that strange charac- ter Marcus Antonius de Dominis, Archbishop of Spalato, who came over to England in the
 * ertain directions, sometimes where least