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been composed by himself. Can any reader of still. The light appeared to be about from fifty "N. & Q." explain the second line?

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to one hundred yards from us. I was told that
such an appearance was commonly seen in marshy
ground after a warm day, and that the country
people called it "Jack o' the lantern." Of course
it can be easily accounted for. Last year I passed
the same spot by day, and saw that a large drain
had been made through the marsh, consequently
I expect my friend "Jack" has vanished with his
lantern to some more genial locality.
SIMON WARD.

A friend informs me he has frequently seen it in a marsh near the town of Stettin in Germany, and has often staid, while passing the place with other persons, to witness its movements. He describes it as like a "good-sized candle flame," constantly appearing and disappearing. Sometimes a dozen or more are visible at one time. Although they are very common, some people feel a little superstitious, and do not pass that place at night.

H. W. D.

W. may be informed that this light has been seen by me (to the best of my recollection, more Bedford Moor, near Torrington, in the north of than once) dancing over some boggy ground on Devon. J. SANSOM.

EXECUTORS OF WILLS.

(Vol. xii., p. 124.)

LEGULEIUS asks when executors were first in

stituted? And he remarks, they were, it appears, quite unknown to the Roman law.

By a dozen of names these wild-fire phenomena are very common in all boggy lands, and were much more so before the agricultural science of drainage was carried to such an extent. I have seen them often; but the most curious example occurred to a friend of mine whose country residence was situated within sight of a low swampy track of meadow. It was exactly at this season of the year (in September) that the household were startled, and the superstitious affrighted by the appearance of strange waving and wandering lights in the locality alluded to, commencing near midnight and lasting for several hours. motion was very eccentric, and they traversed the district in every direction, up and down, backwards and forwards. As day approached they vanished, leaving the observers to account as well as they could for the unusual nightly visitation. Perhaps they had their beginning in ancient At length some, bolder than the rest, having exGreece, for the man who was privileged to make amined the ground by daylight, and discovered a will signed it before witnesses (who were someneither pitfall nor sinking bog, resolved on going times magistrates and archons), and then placed to the spot and ascertaining the nature of the it in the hands of trustees called Epimeletai, who illusion. They went accordingly, noiselessly and were obliged to see it performed. See Archsecretly, and followed up the dancing lights till bishop Potter's Antiquities, by Dunbar, ii. 339. they came upon them; and lo! they were lanterns Isæus seems to be his authority, but I have not tied by collars to the necks of small well-trained the references. The Tueλntal were any persons setters, and in the service of poachers, with nets, who were charged with care, guardianship, or perwho were thus pursuing their vocation and catch-formance, the original apparently of executors ing almost every head of game on the estate. So in modern time. It was, we know, the custom much for a particular Puck-affair. W. J. among the Romans for a man to leave his fortune to a friend on some executory trust. The Hæres Fiduciarius seems to have corresponded to an executor. A testator's wishes, too, are often said to be addressed ad fidei Commissarios. The appointment of an Heres, whom we may call executor in some respects, was essential to the validity of a will among the Romans. "It was," as Dr. Taylor remarks in his Elements of Civil Law (535.), ". a form so necessary, that practice at least, if not law, required it as the principal ingredient."

About twenty years since, while travelling one night in the south of Ireland, about four miles from Killarney, on passing some marshy ground distinctly saw a light flitting about, vanishing at intervals, and appearing again. My driver noticed the same, and we stopped and observed it for near half an hour. It was about the first of September, nine o'clock at night, and the air very

This is supported by the Definition of Modestinus; and it appears that the Hæres Testamenti was the full representative of the testator by the civil law, and succeeded to the whole estate, real as well as personal. See also Hallifax On the Civil Law, 37.; and as to the form and mode of his institution, the sixth book of Justin, Cod., tit. xxiii., De Testamentis, et quemadmodum Testamenta ordinetur, in Corpus Juris Civilis, 194. sqq. "An executor," says Ayliffe in his Parergon Juris Canonici Anglicani, 264., "so called ab exequendo, is in the civil and canon law sometimes called Hares Testamentarius, and often Hæres simply. He had his beginning in the civil law by the Imperial Constitutions." So, too, Cowel attributes the beginning of the executor to "the Constitutions of the Emperors, who first permitted those that thought good by their wills to bestow anything upon godly and charitable uses, to appoint whom they pleased to see the same performed."

It seems to me impossible to peruse the chapters of the civil law quoted by these authorities without seeing that the office of executor was known to the Romans, although not by the modern name of executor, which, as Lord Hardwicke, in a case reported in the third volume of Atkins's Reports, said, "is a barbarous term unknown to that law." Godolphin also treats the executor as known to the civil law, in the Hares Testamentarius (part 2. c. 1. s. 1.); and so, too, Swinburn, in his Treatise on Wills. The custom of making wills among the Teutonic nations is ascribed by Selden to the Romans, and to the reception by Germanic nations of the Roman law. Executors are often named in Anglo-Saxon wills; and there is every reason for believing that the custom of making devises of lands as well as chattels was introduced into England from Rome by Augustine. Wills were not considered in the same ceremonious point of view as the Roman Testamenti. They were partly a settlement or grant, and a testament, and corroborated by being witnessed by prelates, who are made to some extent executors; a portion of the testator's property being usually bequeathed to pious purposes, in which case even the Roman law allowed the intervention of clergy. (Kemble's Introd. to Cod. Dipl. Evi Saxon., p. cviii.) The Anglo-Saxon prelates seem to have answered to the functionaries of the Pontifical College in this respect, who had the care and superintendence of wills and executory trusts. Mr. Kemble doubts whether probate was required among the Anglo-Saxons. There are Saxon wills in which a legatus is not designated or appointed for the execution of the testator's wishes. In some cases (as in the will of Elfhelm, in Lye's Saxon Dictionary, vol. ii., appendix) there is a request to the superior lord, which runs in that instance-"Jam oro te, dilecte domine, ut meum testamentum stare possit, et tu ne sinas ut

ipsum quis pervertat." The earliest will printed in Mr. Kemble's valuable collection of Anglo-Saxon documents is of the ninth century. The Legatum testamentum is rendered in the Anglo-Saxon generan gesetnýsre (gerefan gesetnysse) — words which seem aptly to designate a representative functionary. Glanville (writing, I need hardly say, in the reign of Henry II.) says the executors of a testament should be such persons as the testator has chosen for that purpose; but if he doth not nominate any person, the nearest of kin and relations may take upon them the charge (Lib. vii. ch. 6.). This latter is the executor ab Episcopo Constitutus mentioned by the Canonists and old writers on wills; the former is the executor à testatore Constitutus, or Executor Testamentarius, who is usually meant by the term executor. The older authorities of ecclesiastical law treat the appointment of an executor as essential to a testament; but this strictness, as is remarked by the learned author of Williams on Executors, has long ceased to exist. I have not any reference to the first known appearance of the term executor in our records. In the Rotuli Parl., mention is made of the executors of the will of Bishop John de Kyrkeby in A.D. 1290. Nicolas, in his Ancient Wills, does not give an older example, but there is no doubt the term has been known to our law from a much earlier period. WM. SIDNEY GIBSON.

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In "N. & Q." there are some remarks by DR. CHARLTON on the art of writing in Ogham characters. DR. C. seems to think that those characters originated in the Runic. However, in the British Cyclopædia of Literature, &c., art. OGHAM, it is suggested that they were brought over to Ireland by the Iberian colonists of that country; and the circumstance is mentioned that in Kerry county, the county in which the Iberian colonists are said to have landed, the greatest number of stones inscribed with Ogham characters have been discovered. This subject deserves farther inquiry; and with your permission I will mention a fact

which seems to support the latter hypothesis, and then suggest how the truth of it may be ascertained.

There can be little doubt that a considerable portion of the earliest inhabitants of Britain came from Spain. Arguing from certain physical peculiarities, Tacitus derives the Silures from thence; and this is not only supported by the number of Iberic words occurring as names of places in the country inhabited by those people (South Wales), but by the very name of the Scilly islands Silura showing that they had originally been peopled by the same nation. Now, as the Scillies are on the direct road to Spain, what can be more probable than that the Silures, sailing from Spain to Britain, left some of their number behind on those islands? In a work recently published (A Londoner's Walk to the Land's End, and a Trip to Scilly Isles) the following passage occurs:

"Some of the stones [in the Scillies] are furrowed with what appear to be deeply-graven and mysterious Runes." I have little doubt that these inscriptions are Ogham inscriptions, and that they are the work of the Iberian colonists settled in the Scillies.

Now, if the inscriptions mentioned in the passage which I have quoted were examined, and they proved to be in the Ogham characters, it would go far to prove that those characters were originally used by the Iberians. Farther, in Spain itself inscriptions have been discovered, but the southern antiquaries have not yet been able to decipher them. (See Niebuhr's Lectures on Anc. Ethn. and Geog.) If they were examined and proved to be also in the Ogham character, not only would the origin of that mode of writing be discovered, but the story of the Iberian settlements in Ireland, and of the Iberian origin of the Silures, would be shown to rest on an historical E. WEST.

basis.

VERB AND NOMINATIVE CASE.

(Vol. xii., pp. 65. 153.) W. B. C. does not seem to me to understand the drift of W. M. T.'s remarks. I conceive the latter to be putting in a plea for certain exceptions to a rule of grammar, against the jurists, who are unwilling to allow such exceptions. It is sufficient for the justification of these exceptional phrases, that they are received as idioms, and therefore not to be tried by ordinary laws of syntax. Their history is another matter.

It is not, as I understand it, W. M. T. on his schoolmaster's authority, but only the schoolmaster, who condemns the expression "A man six foot high." I am inclined to join with the schoolmaster, though not from the reason that I do not believe (as W. B. C. does) that this phrase could have "originally stood," in the elegant form

of "A man, six measures of a man's foot each in length, high;" but simply because I do not think that this expression has ever received the sanction of that respectable usage "quem penes arbitrium est."

That the expressions which W. M. T. quotes are all more or less elliptical, there is no doubt, but surely W. B. C.'s ellipses are a little too récherché. Does W. B. C. really believe that the folks who now say "three and eleven pence halfpenny is not a high price for good Irish cloth," were, at some remote period, in the habit of saying "the sum of three shillings and eleven pence and a halfpenny is not a high price to give," or to ask for (a certain quantity of) good Irish cloth? or is this merely a useful grammatical fiction, like the "original contract" between king and people, which you may talk about without believing that it was ever actually signed, sealed, or delivered? When I say "ninety-five is a great age," I quite agree with W. B. C. that the words "ninety-five" alone mean nothing; but there is logically no omission, save of the substantive, which must belong to the adjectives ninety-five. Yet the verb is used in the singular; and the original reason for this was, not that the expression was once thrice as long, but that the idea in the mind is of a total. But I am not at liberty to use a singular verb in any case where any nominative, being plural, is resolvable into a total. I cannot, for instance, say "ninety-five soldiers is arrived," and excuse myself by saying that I meant "a company consisting of ninety-five soldiers is arrived;" and that I considered the word soldiers in the "abbreviated sentence to be used in the genitive case." I have heard people, when surprised at an accusation exclaim, "Me?" and have been at a loss to imagine why they gave the preference to the accusative pronoun on the occasion. But W. B. C.'s theory of ellipses furnishes an explanation in a moment. The part suppressed in the sentence, as it originally stood, is " are you alluding to?" Here you have at once a preposition properly governing an accusative. There is, in fact, scarcely any violation of the rules of syntax which may not be justified in some way by the supposition of an ellipse. It is, therefore, not because the expressions referred to may be capable of rational explanation, but because they are received idioms, that I am allowed to employ them.

T. E. M.

I remember hearing or reading an assertion which, though it may be too much of a generalisation, seems to have many instances to rest upon. It is that the genius of our language reserves the plural for indefinitely many, and expresses definitely many by the singular. This really seems to be almost a rule in composition of

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of a "three-man beetle."

Throughout the country, the uneducated speak of "five year," "seven year." The singular enters whenever the notion is cumulative. They do not say, "I saw five horse in the field," but "five horses." But cumulation, thought of the whole as a whole, without separation into parts, will bear a singular, even when an adjective enters which applies to each of the things stated. As inrats and mice and such small deer, Have been Tom's food for seven long year." The following is an instance in which modern grammar has added the last letter, in defiance of rhyme. It is from the ballad of "The Boy and the Mantle:"

66

"He plucked out of his poterner,
And longer wold not dwell;
He pulled forth a pretty mantle
Betweene two nut-shells."

There are many cases in which the indefinite would demand a plural, where the definite would demand a singular. Of an article usually sold for pence, our ear would instruct us to say that "shillings are a fearful price;" and that "three shillings is a fearful price." And we talk English by ear, not by rule; our grammars do not settle half the points, to say nothing of there being no grammar to which common appeal is made. The rule seems to be that a definite plurality, collectively considered, takes a singular verb. But perhaps the first person to whom the rule is presented will find an instance to the contrary: in fact, a modification immediately suggests itself. As happens so frequently in other cases, our grammar is not purely formal; the meaning influences the phrase. The collection must be of that kind in which the part is lost in the whole, and is of no significance except as contributing to the whole. We may say that "ten shillings is a good price;" but we may not say that "ten men is a large committee."

This want of entire formality in our grammar will probably cause all attempt at construction of rules to fail.

M.

A Man Six Foot high (Vol. xii., p. 65.). W. M. T. wishes for authorities from other languages for this form of speech,—a singular noun with a plural numeral pronoun. It is found in Hindustani, Persian, Magyar, and Welsh. W. BARNES.

NOTES ON TREES AND FLOWERS.

(Vol. xi., p. 460.; Vol. xii., p. 70.)

I have much pleasure in following MR. MACKENZIE WALCOTT with a spicilegium of Notes on books which treat of trees and flowers.

Of Réné Rapin's Horti, a copy of which is now J. Evelyn, Hallam says: before me, and of which there is a translation by

"A far superior performance is the poem on Gardens by the Jesuit Réné Rapin. For skill in varying and adorning his subject, for a truly Virgilian spirit in expression, for the exclusion of feeble, prosaic, or awkward lines, he may perhaps be equal to any poet, to Sammarthanus, or to Sannazarus himself. His cadences are generally very gratifying to the ear, and in this respect he is much above Vida. But his subject or his genius has prevented him from rising very high; he is the poet of gardens, and what gardens are to nature, that is he to mightier poets. There is also too monotonous a repetition of nearly the first book: the descriptions are separately good, and great same images, as in his long enumeration of flowers in the artifice is shown in varying them; but the variety could not be sufficient to remove the general sameness that belongs to an horticultural catalogue."

See Rapin's preface, in which he vindicates his use of fables or legends, "Ne carmen langueret insita jejunitate præceptionis, quam profitebatur."

"The first book of the Gardens of Rapin is on flowers, the second on trees, the third on waters, and the fourth on fruits. The poem is of about three thousand lines, sustained with equable dignity. All kinds of graceful associations are mingled with the description of his flowers, in the fanciful style of Ovid and Darwin: the violet is Ianthis, who lurked in valleys to shun the love of Apollo, and stained her face with purple to preserve her chastity; the rose is Rhodanthe, proud of her beauty, and worshipped by the people in the place of Diana, but changed by the indignant Apollo to a tree; while the populace, who had adored her, are converted into her thorns, and her chief lovers into snails and butterflies."

"As the poem of Rapin," continues Mr. Hallam, "is not in the hands of every one who has taste for Latin poetry, I will give as a specimen the introduction to the second book.""

I have here the pleasure of adding some of the lines containing the associations above referred to, and on a future occasion I hope to illustrate other objects of curious legends:

"The Violet.

"Hanc olim vaccas quando pavisse Phereas
Dicitur, errantem vidit cum Phoebus, amavit:
Nec vulnus celavit amans, perterrita virgo
Proripuit sese in sylvas, monuitque Dianam.
Illa, soror colles, inquit, fuge; namque supremos
Phoebus amat colles, et cælo gaudet aperto.
Ibat per valles Virgo, fontesque petebat
Umbriferos, sepesque inter deserta latebat.

.... Jam furta Deus fraudesque parabat.
Cum dea: formosa si non licet esse pudicam:
Ah! pereat potius quæ non fert forma pudorem.
Dixit, et obscura infecit ferrugine vultum.".

"The Rose.

"Hortorum regina suos ostendit honores,
Præ qua puniceis ardens aurora quadrigis
Palleat, atque suos confundat Delia vultus.

Fraternos animos injuria facta sorori
Permovit, læsoque furens pro numine Phoebus
Ultores radios obliquo lumine torsit:
Lumine quo, cœpit primum tædere Rhodanthen
Esse deam. Nam pes per sese altaribus ipsis
Figitur, et ductis saxo radicibus hæret.
Jam virides tollit ramos, dum brachia tendit.
Languet egens animi, sed adhuc regina, suamque
Dum mutat formam, vel sic mutasse decebat,
Nam pulcher flos est, fuerat quæ pulchra Rhodanthe,
Felix, divinos si nunquam visa fuisset
Digna pati cultus, nec sic meruisset amari."

BIBLIOTHECAR. CHETHAM.

should be heated with great care, otherwise the enamel will crack, and the picture be destroyed.

The inventors have executed some portraits in this manner, which exhibit a remarkable finish. It is peculiarly applicable to jewellery; several small portraits may be formed into bracelets, or separately they may be used for studs, buttons, &c. It may also be applied to terra cotta, porcelain, and glass, as well as to metals.

It is very rapid, the whole process not occupying more than a quarter of an hour, however unfavourable the state of the atmosphere may be.

Corporation Records: Application of Photography in copying MSS.- The value and importance of photography cannot be better appreciated than in its adaptation to the copying of ancient manuscripts. We have just seen a beautiful specimen of the art in a copy of King John's Charter to Great Yarmouth, as a frontispiece to a privately-circulated repertory of the records of the corporation of that town, printed at the expense of the Town Council. It suggests to us what may be done in making

Addenda to MR. WALCOTT'S "Notes on Trees photography universally useful in our municipal instituand Flowers :"

Ivy, immortality.

Have a Symbolism.

White Lily, purity.
Palm-branch, martyrdom.

Oak, virtue and majesty.

Passion-flower, crucifixion.

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Names of Founders and Donors of Religious Buildings. Mulberry leaves are used in St. Mary's Church, New Shoreham; the convent to which it belonged having been erected by Sir John Mowbray. Maple leaves are upon a brass in St. Mary's Church, Broadwater, Sussex, to Walter Mapleton. The Rose (for Roslyn) occurs in most of the decorations in Roslyn chapel, near Edinburgh.

"Blazed every rose-carved buttress fair." Have given Origin to many Embellishments of Architecture. The papyrus in the temples of Egypt.

The acanthus was used in the Corinthian as well as in the Composite Order.

The Continental and English cathedrals are decorated with the vine, strawberry, holly, woodbine, oak, ivy, common avens, fern, thistle, sunflower, laurel, ranunculus, and many others.

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W. P. GRIFFITH.

PHOTOGRAPHIC CORRESPONDENCE. Photography on Enamel. A recent number of La Lumière contains a notice of a process for photographing on enamel, invented and patented by MM. Bulot and Cattin, of the firm of Tournachon and Company. The object is taken as a positive on collodion, which is afterwards detached from the glass and laid upon a plate of metal (silver, copper, iron, steel, &c.), covered with enamel of the colour that the dark parts of the picture are intended to be: this is heated to redness, the enamel softens, and the picture becomes incorporated with the vitrified coating of the metal.

This process, though very simple, requires several precautions; it is particularly necessary that the plate

*

Archæologia, vol. xxxiii. p. 48.

tions; and we take the occasion of offering a recommendation to other corporate bodies to take the same liberal views as the corporation of Yarmouth have done, by printing a list of their charters and records; and where manuscripts are, from their antiquity or other adventitious circumstances, worthy of being effectually saved from the ruthless hand of Time, multiplied copies may be taken of them for illustration.

Novel Method of taking Stereoscopes (Vol. xii., p. 171.). Though I am an ardent photographer, I content myself with profiting by your photographic correspondence, without filling your columns with my own numerous difGEORGE NORMAN is playing off upon credulous photoficulties. I cannot, however, sit quietly by while MR. graphers his "Novel Method." I beg to warn those of

your correspondents who have not, as I have, studied the theory of the stereoscope, that this "Novel Method" is a pure delusion. It is simply impossible to get a stereoscopic picture without two diverse perspectives; and it is equally impossible to make two diverse perspectives Method," moreover, is not altogether new. Dr. Anthony coincide without a binocular apparatus. The "Novel of Birmingham mentioned to me nearly a year ago his attempts to produce a single stereoscopic photograph, and I then told him, as I now tell MR. NORMAN, that the thing is an impossibility. C. MANSFIELD INGLEBY.

Birmingham.

MR. NORMAN'S suggestion for obtaining a single stereoScopic picture to exhibit the properties of the double picture, cannot, I apprehend, be acted on with any satisfaetory result. Last winter, as a family amusement, I attempted to unite the two pictures on the screen by means of the double lantern, but failed. In certain parts where the images coincided, or nearly so, there was a little increase of intensity, and this might have been the case throughout the picture, if the extreme limits of the two images could have been made to coincide; but this is a practical impossibility. A little consideration will, I think, suffice to show that the stereoscopic effect can be produced only by two pictures, viewed by an apparatus (a stereoscope) that restricts each eye to one of them. If a single picture be taken on MR. NORMAN's plan, or if two pictures be united on the screen by the double lan-. tern, the result obtained is either a picture differing in no respect from our ordinary view of any object, or it is a compound picture formed of two images not perfectly coincident, and whilst coincidence could not be effected by looking upon it with one eye, the looking upon it with

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