Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 8.djvu/93

 9" s. viii. JULY 27, 1901.) NOTES AND QUERIES.

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furd (son of Sir Reginald de (Jrawfurd of Loudoun, and ancestor of the Craufurds of Kilbirnie) is said by Burke to have " acquired part of the lordship and barony of Crawfurd." The explanation, I suppose, is that a major barony, such as the barony of Crawford apparently was, contained several lesser baronies, to any one of which the term "lordship" could with equal propriety be applied, though the holder of the entire- barony alone was actually a peer. A. B.

AUTHORS OF QUOTATIONS WANTED. The hearts of men, which fondly here admire Fair-seeming shows, may lift themselves up higher, And learn to love with zealous, humble duty The eternal fountain of that heavenly beauty. These lines are inscribed round the central hall of the rooms of the Royal Academy of Arts.

R. B. B.

[From the third stanza of Spenser's ' Hymne of Heavenly Beautie.']

Have communion with few,

Be familiar with one, Deal justly with all, And speak evil of none.

H. J. B. So nigh to glory is our dust,

So near to God is man, When Duty whispers low, " Thou must," The man replies, " I can."

He is oft the wisest man Who is not wise at all.

PERTINAX.

"TOUCAN." (9 th S. vii. 486 ; viii. 22, 67.)

I SHOULD have been content to let pass MR. PLATT'S search into the native languages of Brazil for the root of the word, making due note of it, but H. G. K. has started another derivation which requires reply. His claim of a Malay origin for the word may be best met by the following passage from Yule and Burnell's ' Anglo-Indian Glossary,' which lay ready levelled at it :

"We have here, in fact, a remarkable instance of the coincidences which often justly perplex ety- mologists, or would perplex them if it were not so much their habit to seize on one solution and de- spise the others. Not only is tukanff in Malay ' an artificer,' but, as Willoughby tells us, the Spaniards called the real S. American toucan ' carpintero,' from the noise he makes. And yet there seems no room for doubt that Toucan is a Brazilian name for a Brazilian bird. See the quotations, and especially Thevet's, with its date."

Here follows the quotation from The vet, 1558 :

"Sur la coste de la marine, la plus frequente

marchandise est le plumage d'un oyseau, qu'ils

appellent en leur langue Toucan, lequel descrivons

sommairement puis qu'il vient k propos Au reste

cest oyseau est merveilleusement difforme et mon- strueux, ayant le bee plus gros et plus long quasi que le reste du corps."

And it is also noted that Aldrovandi (1599) gives the word as " Toucham." I have not access to this naturalist's work, but it may be noteworthy that while Ambroise Pare in Littre's quotation calls the bird " Toucan," in the Latin edition by Jacques Guillemeau (1582) it becomes " avem Toucain dictam," and in Thos. Johnson's translation (1634) it "is called Touca." Probably "Toucam" came to be considered as the accusative case of "Touca." It may be worth while reproducing Johnson's translation of the passage from Pare :

"Wee have read in Thevet's Cosmographie that hee saw a bird in America which in that countrie speech is called Touca, in this verie monstrous and deformed, for that the beak in length and thickness exceed's the bigness of the rest of the bodie."

I may mention that the figure given in the Latin edition of Pare is very fair : the bird's foot is given correctly only two toes in front. It need scarcely be said that the hornbill has not the scansorial foot. I believe that the name toucan was given to this bird by the English in India from its enormous beak recall- ing pictures of the wonderful South Ameri- can bird, and that the error was maintained by certain British characteristics, of which the 'Anglo-Indian Glossary' contains many examples. It was when I first saw a hornbill, shot on the barrack hill at Calicut, and heard it called a toucan, that I became inspired with a few sparks of the zeal which impelled my lamented friend Arthur C. Burnell, then Assistant to the Collector of Malabar, to devote much of his literary work to the cor- rection of errors in Anglo-Indian natural history. EDWARD NICHOLSON.

1, Huskisson Street, Liverpool.

Whether I misinterpreted MR. PLATT or made the less include the greater your readers will decide. I intended him no injustice, though he, in my opinion, was unjust to others. With the shortcomings, if any, of Littre and Prof. Whitney I am not concerned ; and what the facts may be to which MR. PLATT states that he is " the first writer to draw attention " are to me not clear. I only wished to draw attention to a fact which he had overlooked, and had no desire to provoke any controversy.

ALFRED NEWTON.

CHARLES LAMB AS A JOURNALIST (9 th S. viii. 60). MR. LUCAS says, quite correctly, that in my edition of * Lamb's Letters ' I