Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 7.djvu/305

 9* s. vii. APRIL is, 1901.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

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boats and advanced towards Byzantium According to the chronicles of that time he had wheels put under his vessels, their sail were unfurled, and, thus impelled by the wind, they were enabled to arrive overland at their destination. The Greek emperor was so astonished and alarmed at the sight that he hastened to make peace immediately T. P. ARMSTRONG.

"QUOT LINGUAS CALLES, TOT HOMINES

VALES " (7 th S. iii. 129 ; 8 th S. iii. 66). I have discovered the Turkish equivalent of this proverb in a small seventeenth-century book entitled "Colloquia FamiliariaTurcico-Latina, per Jacobum Nagy de Harsany (Berlin, 1672),' on the verso of the title-page. As * N. & Q. does not print any thing in Oriental characters, I must omit the Turkish original and con- tent myself with giving Nagy's Latin trans- lation of it, which is headed " Prov. turcicum,' and is given thus: "Quantum quis lin- guarum noverit, tot hominum vices sustinet."

L. L. K.

IPPLEPEN, co. DEVON (9 th S. vi. 409 ; vii. 50, 113, 217). I wonder whether A. H. writes "all in fun." At the third reference I called attention to DR. NEUBAUER'S sportive essays in Anglo -Hebrew etymology, which to my humble intelligence seemed fully as valuable as those of MR. THORPE ; also to the absurd blunder made by Truth in taking them seriously. And now comes A. H. and tells me with all gravity that I am wrong in taking them seriously. Can any one except A. H. have so read me upside down 1 Verily, there is but one A. H. C. B. MOUNT.

"So LONG" (9 th S. vii. 129, 233). A discus- sion arose over this phrase in 1898, when it was used by Mr. Tree in * Ragged Robin ' at Her Majesty's Theatre. I do not think that it is "peculiarly a sailor's phrase." When I was at school, nearly thirty years ago, it was a common expression, and we almost in variably said " So long " when we otherwise should have said " Au revoir." S. J. A. F.

THE LAST MALE DESCENDANT OF DANIEL DEFOE (9 th S. vii. 86, 177). The distinc- tion of being the last (authenticated) descend- ant in the male line of Daniel Defoe belongs to the only son of the late Mr. James W. Defoe, whose death was chronicled ante, p. 86. This youth, Daniel by name, was a sailor by profession, and predeceased his father in 1896 at San Francisco, at the age of twenty-two.

I am indebted for this information to Mr. Wright, whose researches in connexion with the preparation of his monumental * Life of

Defoe' brought him into intimate relation with his descendants, this young man among them, from whom he received many letters. In his dainty little volume entitled 'The Acid [?] Sisters, and other Poems,' published in 1897, Mr. Wright has commemorated his young friend's untimely death in some verses under the heading ' The Two Defoes.' I have somewhere secreted, with an ingenuity that baffles all my attempts to recover it, a cutting (probably from an early number of the Sketch) containing notices of James Defoe and his son, with portraits of both, the latter, if memory serves me, attired as a Blue-coat scholar.

A. H. can scarcely have seen Mr. Wright's 4 Life of Defoe,' the closing section of which contains copious particulars of Defoe's de- scendants and a pedigree of the Foe family from 1631 to 1894, which in many points is at variance with the statements of A. H. For example, according to Mr. Wright it was Norton, the novelist's younger son, who emi- grated to America, and not Daniel, his elder son, as A. H. asserts. Again, the Samuel Defoe who died in 1783 (according to Wright) or in 1782 (according to A. H.) was the son of Daniel, and not of his brother Norton, as alleged by A. H.

Descendants of Defoe through the marriage of his youngest daughter Sophia with Henry Baker, an eminent man of science (whose works on microscopy have still authority and value), survive in the persons of the Rev. Henry Defoe Baker, rector of Thruxton, Hants, and his cousin the Rev. William Defoe Baker, rector of Welton, Lincolnshire.

In making use of the word " authenticated " at the commencement of this reply I spoke advisedly, because Mr. Wright informs us that three (out of the seventeen) children of the novelist's younger son Norton, who emi- grated to Carolina, were living in 1737. " Their descendants," he says, " are scattered about the earth. One cropped up in a Mel- 3ourne post office a year or two back, but nothing could be got out of him except that le was descended from the great Daniel." Here is a promising field for the exploitation of enterprising Antipodeans.

CHARLES KING. Torquay.

I hope MR. HIBGAME is incorrect in stating that Defoe's last descendant is dead. Between 1880 and 1886 I was in Herts, near Bishop's Stortford, and the 3e Foes were then living in Thorley.

interested myself in a little boy who, if alive, must be about eighteen, and did my