Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 8.djvu/88

 NOTES AND QUERIES.

P* B. vm.

poem by Paul the Silentiary, in which a fine (76) appears to have been misunderstood. It is this : Sravpov VTrcp Kopv^f}* cpvo-iirroXw eypa^c

Lethaby and Swainson say in a note (p. 42), 4 ' Iypo0 leaves no doubt that a mosaic cross on the interior is intended, and not as Salzenberg suggests, a cross on the outside. But M. Antoniadi remarks that the expres- sion VTTCP Kopv<r)s means " above the top or summit," and could never apply to a cross drawn on the interior. The drawing, he thinks, applies, like the French word esqmsse, to the preliminary sketch before the actual erection of the cross.

M. Antoniadi also points out how some broken verses of the Silentiary, referring to the mosaic decoration of the dome, have been overlooked. W. T. LYNN.

Blackheath.

.—Two examples of folk-lore are given in Mr. W. Boyd Dawkins's 'Early Man in Britain' (1880) on which it would be interesting to have further information.

1. We are told that in the Isle of Man barrows are protected from destruction by the fear of the spirits of those whose ashes they contain, and

Mr. Dawkins further adds that "this is probably the last example of a burnt sacrifice in civilized Europe" (p. 338). If this really occurred it is important to have a full account of it. There is in 'The Denham Tracts' (Folk-lore Society), vol. ii. p. 327, an account of a calf being burnt alive in 1824 at Sowerby, near Halifax. Reference is made to the Newcastle Magazine of that year, p. 4. I have read somewhere, but neglected to make a note of it, that a deed of this kind was perpetrated in Devonshire in what we may call recent days.

2. In 1832 there was found in a large burial-hill near Mould, in North Wales, a skeleton wearing a corselet of gold, 3 ft. 7 in. long. "The place was supposed to be haunted, and before the discovery was made a spectre was said to have been seen to enter the cairn clad in golden armour" (p. 433). I am anxious to know what evidence we have that this gold clad spectre was reported to have been seen before the barrow was destroyed. It is very difficult to believe that an accurate tradition of the vesture in which this prehistoric corpse was buried can have been handed down through the many generations which must have intervened between the day on which the funeral rites were performed and that of its discovery; yet no other explanation seems possible except that such a spectre was seen in very truth, which latter interpretation would, of course, seem to almost every reader of 'N & Q.' as crudely unscientific as the things one reads in the 'Magnum Speculum Exemplorum.'

THE DERIVATION OF "ANACONDA." (See 8 th S. xii. 123 : 9 th S. i. 184.) I am sorry to see hat Prof. Skeat, in the new edition of his Concise Etymological Dictionary, has re- ained Sir Henry Yule's ingenious, but utterly untenable suggestion as to the origin ot anaconda, viz., "Tamil dnai-kondra [we] which killed an elephant." As I showed in N. & Q.' at the first of the pages cited above, anaconda = Sinhalese henakandaya, the name of the graceful whip-snake, Passerita (Dryo- vhis) mycterizans, and by an extraordinary Blunder (probably a change of labels on specimens in the Leyden Museum) was trans- ferred to the Python molurus.

DONALD FERGUSON.

Croydon.

" HUMPH." The following extract from interest :
 * he Pall Mall Gazette of 26 April seems of

" The meaning of the word ' humph ' was re- cently the subject of judicial decision in the Irish Court of Appeal. Mr. Justice Madden and Mr. Justice Boyd held that ' humph,' as used by Sir Walter Scott and Miss Austen in their novels, was an expression of dissent, while the Lord Chief Justice and Mr. Justice Burton inclined to the conclusion that ' humph ' only meant a ' dissatisfied condition of the mind.' The Court of Appeal has now decided that the word is 'an expression of doubt or dissatisfaction,' or, as Lord Justice Walker put it, in the words of the ' Century Dictionary,' ' a grunt of dissatisfaction.' "

A. F. R

MAHOMET'S COFFIN. There is a well-known story about the coffin of Mahomet hanging equidistant between heaven and earth. This was often attributed to the power of mag- netism, the last couch of the prophet being E laced between two loadstones. The possi- ility of such a method of suspension is an article of belief in Kashmir. Of Lalitaditya L. king of the country about A.D. 697, we are tola that he " set up an image of Nri singha, un- supported by anything, but placed in the air between two loadstones, one above and one below" (' Kings of Kashmir,' a translation of