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NOTES AND QUERIES. [9 th s. ix. MARCH 29, 1002.

tions, and we are thus getting nearer to the chronograms that were to come. For example, here is a date from a tomb in Gough's 4 Sepulchral Monuments ' :

M anno C quater bis XI ruit iste Luce bis X et I April, which corresponds to 21 April, 1422.

But not till about the middle of the six- teenth century did chronograms come to the front, and succeed in ousting, most likely for ever, the rather childish jingles and doggerel of the monks from their tombs and their books. Josephus a Pinu deserves the credit of the first important work in which chrono- grams occur to any great extent, and all that we know about him is duly recorded by Mr. Hilton in his monumental and exhaustive book on * Chronograms,' which is alone in the field, and not likely to be superseded for many a long day. The editorial note referred to it as one volume only, but it consists of three thick quartos, and is full of excellent illustrations and engravings.

It is surprising how many otherwise well- informed people will either stare with sur- prise if the subject of chronograms is casually mentioned in conversation, or else blurt out, as I have heard more than once, "Oh, yes, I know. I used once to try and guess them every week in the World; but they make them so awfully hard now ! " The subject is really a most curious and interesting one, and covers a larger ground than one would imagine. Whole books have been written which were entirely chronogrammatic from cover to cover. Plays have been written, and acted as well, where every line in the play was a chronogram, and, to make matters more difficult, a Dutch one. Fine flowing Latin poems of many thousand lines of excellent elegiacs have been written alto- gether in chronograms. Biographies of saintly and courtly men and women have been given to the world (in very few copies) by ardent devotees of this literary artifice ; and I know of a scholarly bibliophile who even now, in these realistic and materialistic times, will produce week by week a batch of excellent chronograms, both in Latin arid English, on the current events of the day. They are to be found in many buildings, both old and new, on the Continent, and sometimes reward a searcher in some few of our own village churches. They are found on coins and rings, on keys and spades the spade that cut the first sod for a canal was often decorated with one as a memento on bells and foundation stones, on cups and platters and book-plates, and on the Utle-pages of books most of all. They

abound in the records of festivities at births and marriages of the mighty in the land, and they often acted the part of the recording angel when death came to the distin- guished ruler or ecclesiastic. They have preserved the date of many a tomb and many a book, and have pleasantly and harmlessly occupied the leisure hours of many a student. They have adorned numerous costly pageants, and have literally crowded the windows at many a public evening illumination abroad. They enlightened the public in a double sense then. But the English public, whether cultured or not, is here still very much in the dark. NE QUID NIMIS.

SATHALIA (9 th S. viii. 423). This place, seen on the voyage from Rhodes to Cyprus, is apparently the ancient Attaleia in ram- phylia, identified in Pauly's 'Real-Encyclo- padie der classischen Alterthums wissenschaf t ' (ed. Wissowa, vol. ii., 1896) with the modern Adalia. Meyer's ' Conversations - Lexicon ' (Original-Ausgabe) gives Antalia, Attalia, Satalia, as different forms of the name. In the last-mentioned work of reference and in Smith's ' Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography ' (unfortunately I have no more special treatise at hand at this moment), the site of the earlier town is said riot to coincide exactly with that of the modern. Could ruins of Attalus's town have given rise in mediaeval times to a story to account for its destruction 1 EDWARD BENSLY.

University, Adelaide, South Australia.

" SAULIES " (9 th S. ix. 108, 151). CELER tells us that " to obtain the dissyllabic word saulie we must go back to a dissyllabic French form." If saulie has anything to do with willow, it may, of course, be the Scotch rendering of the English word salloiv applied south of the Tweed to Salix caprcea.

If CELER had not decided otherwise, I would suggest that the French word saule may at some time have been used in Scotland alter- natively with saugh as the word for willow. If so, saulie in Scotch would have been applied to a man connected with willows or carrying a willow wand, for neither before nor since the Union have we been bound by any such law as CELER enunciates.

My reason for thinking so is that the great French willow herb (Epilobiumangustifolium) is always known with us as the ** muckle saulie," and I have always supposed that we were indebted for this name to our old league with France. South of the Border you called it "great French willow herb " ; here we seem to have elegantly