fluence. Superstition, I believe, may be proved to be perfectly independent of education, as it exists almost equally among the highly educated and the most ignorant, while persons from both these classes may be found equally free from its degrading trammels. A work designed to illustrate this fact or opinion would be extremely interesting and instructive, and I shall be glad to hear that some able person has entered on such an undertaking. The folk lore of " N. & Q." will be very useful, and may be made more so towards the accomplishment of this object, if instances of superstitious notions and practices among the higher classes, and they abound, be also included. I am prepared to contribute some instances, and I shall do it the more readily when a definite and useful object is known to be in view. W. H. K. Weather Prophecy (Vol. v., p. 534.).-I have heard the very same prophecy in Sweden, where it is said never to fail. This summer the oak has come out before the ash in Aberdeenshire, which I beg thus to place on record. G. J. R. G. Ellen Castle, Aberdeenshire. PRINTER'S ERRORS IN THE INSEPARABLE PAR TICLES IN SHAKSPEARE. pas Among the most frequent causes of obscurity in the text of the old editions, this stands pre-eminent. The instances are many and manifold. Two sages in the play of King Lear have occurred to me, which need, I think, only be pointed out to carry conviction even to the most rigid stickler for the integrity of the old copies. In Act II. Sc. 1., where Edmund misrepresents to his father his encounter with his brother Edgar, he says: "Full suddenly he fled." On which Gloucester exclaims; The printer has, singularly enough, committed the same mistake in the first line of Act IV. A passage from which, as it stands in all the late editions, it would be vain to try to extract a meaning. Edgar enters in his disguise, and is made to say: "Yet better thus and known to be contemn'd Than still contemn'd and flatter'd." Now it must be evident to common sense, that he alludes to his disguised condition; and that to make sense of the passage, we must read, as Johnson suggested: "Yet better thus unknown," &c. Edgar could not mean to say that he was known in his disguise! The plain meaning must be, “It is better to be contemned in this beggarly disguise unknown, than in my true rank and character to be flattered though secretly contemned." From a similar lapse of the printer, a passage in King John, Act III. Sc. 1., has been made the subject of much unnecessary comment, some of which, from its pseudo-Collins character, might well have been spared. Constance says: "O Lewis, stand fast; the devil tempts thee bere In likeness of a new untrimmed bride.” Theobald proposed to read, "a new and trimmed bride." And Dr. Richardson, in his excellent Dictionary, suggests that untrimmed was a mere corruption of entrimmed. MR. DYCE, to whom every reader of our early drama is so much indebted, informs me that he hastily fell into the views of the commentators regarding the meaning of untrimmed, but that he is now convinced it is here simply an error of the printer for uptrimmed; a mistake easily made at press. Trimmed up, and decked up, were the current phrases applied to a bride dressed for her nuptials. We have both phrases in Romeo and Juliet: Capulet says to the nurse, "Go waken Juliet, go and trim her up." He had previously said to his wife: "Go thou to Juliet, help to deck her up,” It is satisfactory, by such a simple and undoubted correction, to get rid of heaps of idle babble and verbiage about a word that the poet certainly never wrote, and certainly never conceived, with the meaning that some of the commentators would give to it. This will be evident from a passage in his eighteenth sonnet : "And every fair from fair sometimes declines, By chance, on Nature's changing course, untrimm'd.” S. W. SINGER. DR. CUMMING ON ROMANS VIII. I cannot pretend to any acquaintance with Dr. Cumming's works, which appear to be at present very popular, and am therefore unable to say whether a passage in one of them, which has just been brought under my notice, be a fair sample of the whole; but it is, at all events, so curious in a literary point of view as to deserve some public notice. The volume is entitled, Voices of the Night, Seventh Thousand, 1852; and the subject of the sermon or chapter in which the passage occurs is, "Nature's Travail and Expectancy" (Rom. viii. 19-22.). On this, then, Dr. Cumming discourses as follows (pp. 158–9.): "The celebrated German poet and philosopher Goethe, who lived and died a sceptic, and whose testimony, therefore, was not meant to confirm that of the Bible, has said, When I stand all alone at night in open nature, I feel as though nature were a spirit, and begged redemption of me.' And again, he says, 'Often, often have I had the sensation as if nature, in wailing sadness, entreated something of me; so that not to understand what she longed for, has cut me to the very heart.' But I present another witness-that of a great and good man. Martin Luther says: Albeit the creature hath not speech such as we have, it hath a language still, which God the Holy Spirit heareth and understandeth. How nature groaneth for the wrong it must endure from those who so misuse and abuse it!' Here we have the sceptic Goethe and the eminent Christian Luther concurring in the same thing. And the poet who is supposed to tread nearest to the inspired, says very beautifully: To me they seem, Those fair [far] sad streaks that reach along the west Like strains of song still [long, full] yearning [,] from the chords To begin with the latter part of this extract. The reader may perhaps ask, Who is "the poet who is supposed to tread nearest to the inspired?" I cannot tell who may have been in Dr. Cumming's mind; but the verses were really written by an excellent friend of mine, quite unknown to the world as a poet; and are to be found at p. 298. of a translation of Olshausen On the Epistle to the Romans, which was published by Messrs. Clark, of Edinburgh, in 1849. I do not think that Dr. Cumming has improved them by substituting the words in Italics for those which I have restored within brackets, or by his changes in the punctuation, one of which turns the substantive yearning into a participle, while another makes an adjective of the adverb still. And I am unable to imagine how he can have been led to attribute them to any celebrated writer, since the translator of Olshausen very sufficiently intimates that they are of his own composition. Next, I have to remark that for the quotations from "the sceptic Goethe and the eminent Christian Luther," as also for another quotation from the latter (p. 145.), and for very much besides, Dr. Cumming is indebted to Olshausen, whose name he never condescends to mention, although at pp. 134-5. he parades a host of other commentators, including Chrysostom, Jerome, Theodoret, and almost all the ancient fathers, with scarcely a single exception." 66 Lastly, the words which are fathered on Goethe are not his. Olshausen (Germ. iii. 314., Eng. 284.) gives a reference to Goethe's Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde, and introduces them as something which "Bettina writes." Dr. Cumming would seem never to have heard of the Correspondence, and to have mistaken Bettina for a creature of the poet's imagination; but, if so, was it quite fair to tell his hearers and readers that the words supposed to be put into her mouth were the expression of Goethe's personal feeling? J. C. ROBERTSON. Bekesbourne. PROGRESSIVE DEVELOPMENT AND TRANSMUTATION OF SPECIES. I think it is high time that experiments, conducted on scientific principles, should be made on the transmutation of species in the vegetable kingdom. The fact of such transmutation, if not cer tain, appears to be the only solution of several remarkable phenomena already brought to light. It is now a matter of fact, capable of easy experiment, that if oats be sown in the spring, and be kept topped during the summer and autumn (without wounding the leaves), a crop of rye makes its appearance at the close of the summer of the following year. An analogous fact, equally well known, though not so significant, is the seeds of an immense number of flowers and trees invariably give birth to varieties apparently distinct from their parent plants. (For instance, the dahlia, laburnum, and fuchsia.) But the fact I wish to introduce to your pages is one quite as remarkable as the first I have mentioned. It is this. If a stock of yellow laburnum (Cytisus laburnum) be grafted upon the common purple laburnum (Cytisus Alpinus), the resulting tree frequently bears three distinct species of Cytisus, viz.: I. And abundantly, the purple laburnum. III. Still more sparingly, a beautiful plant, known by the name of the purple Cytisus, but specifically distinct, and in appearance totally different from a laburnum. I beg to give you three references as a voucher of the fact. Mr. Cowdrey, the florist, who has large nursery gardens at Edgbaston, near Birmingham, has one specimen, with the history of which he is personally acquainted: no graft of the purple Cytisus has touched this tree. Mr. Holcombe of Valentines, near Ilford, has another specimen ; and in my father's plantations at Kingsheath, near Birmingham, there are four trees of purple laburnum grafted on stocks of yellow laburnum; and of these, two have put forth the purple Cytisus in abundance. Let no one imagine that the purple Cytisus is merely a variety of the purple laburnum. It is, as I have said, specifically distinct. Its flowers do not grow in racemes, as in the two laburnums, but are on short footstalks all along the branch, with a very peculiar and small foliage springing from the same points of the branch. This fact can leave the problem of changes of species into species no longer of doubtful solution. Perhaps this note may lead to others of more scientific research. Surely a series of well-digested experiments would not merely confirm the facts already known, but lead to a rationale of the presumed transmutation. C. MANSFIELD INGLEBY. Minor Notes. Apuleius on Mesmerism. I transcribe the folowing passage, which I have just met with in Apuleius, as a very early allusion to Mesmerism: "Quin et illud mecum reputo, posse animum humanum, præsertim puerilem et simplicem seu carminum avocamento, sive odorum delenimento, soporari, et ad oblivionem præsentium externari; et paulisper remota corporis memoriâ, redigi ac redire ad naturam suam, quæ est immortalis scilicet et divina: atque ita, veluti quodam sopore, futura rerum præsagire."-Apuleius, Apol. 475. Delph. ed. RECHABITE. The Domiciliary Clause. - In 1547 a proclamation was issued by Henry VIII., "that all women should not meet together to babble and talk, and that all men should keep their wives in their houses." ALIQUIS. Transmission of Ancient Usages.-To the derivation of certain customs and usages from the East via Gades or Cadiz, as in the case of the address "uncle" in Andalusia and Cornwall, and the clouted cream in Syria and Cornwall, may be added the use, in the same county, of a lock without wards actually now to be seen sculptured on the great temple of Karnac, in Egypt, too plainly to be mistaken. The principle is similar to that in one of Bramah's locks. Mr. Trevelyan some years ago brought this fact to the notice of the Royal Institution. The principle is not easily explained without an engraving. The voyages of Hamilcar and others to this part of England for tin is in this way remarkably corroborated, independently of that resemblance in domestic implements, and those of personal use, both in ancient and modern times, which may be traced in the antiquities collected in the British Museum. C. REDDING. Inscription on an Oak Chest.—I copy the following inscription from the lid of an old oak chest, measuring four feet eight inches and a half long, and two feet three inches and a half broad. The words are taken from Isaiah, chap. i. ver. 16, 17.: "1.5.9.1. CEASE. TO.DO.EVILL. LEARNE.TO.DO.GOOD SEKE.TO.DO.RIGHT. RELIVE.THE. POORE" The letters, it may be observed, are formed by brass-headed nails driven into the wood, in exactly the same manner as trunkmakers do at the present day, to ornament their boxes. It is the property of the Coopers' Company, and, from the spirit of the legend, I should say that it was formerly used to hold the documents relating to the various charities of which the Company are trustees. Kilburn. - A. W. The Raising of Charles I.'s Standard at Nottingham. The frontispiece to Cattermole's Civil War represents a forlorn group of men, women, and children, watching the fixing into the ground of a large flag, which a soldier is seeking to strengthen by stakes driven round the base of the flagstaff. Surely this is not a correct delineation of that event? Rushworth, it is true, says the standard was fixed in an open field at the back side of the castle wall; but the common opinion, that its position was rather the summit of one of the old turrets of the castle, receives confirmation from a source little known to the public, viz. the memoranda of the antiquary, John Aubrey. In a letter sent to him by Sherrington Talbot (of Laycock ?), who was present at the "raising," the writer says that he saw the flag "lying horizontally on the tower;" this horizontal position being occasioned by the tempest which, it need hardly be added, cast the standard down almost as soon as erected. J. W. Queries. REMARKABLE EXPERIMENTS. A living man, lying on a bench, extended as a corpse, can be lifted with ease by the forefingers of two persons standing on each side, provided the lifters and the liftee inhale at the moment the effort is being made. If the liftee do not inhale, he cannot be moved off the bench at all; but the inhalation of the lifters, although not essential, seems to give additional power. The fact is undeniable. I have never met with any one who could explain it. Has it ever been, "This evening with Mr. Brisband, speaking of enchantments and spells, I telling him some of my charmes; he told me this of his own knowledge, at Bourdeaux, in France. 66 6 "The words were these: Levons te au nom de Jesus Christ." "He saw four little girls, very young ones, all kneeling each of them, upon one knee; and one begun the first line, whispering in the eare of the next, and the second to the third, and the third to the fourth, and she to the first. "Then the first begun the second line, and so round quite through; and putting each one finger only to a boy that lay flat upon his back on the ground, as if he was dead at the end of the words, they did with their four fingers raise this boy as high as they could reach. And Mr. Brisband, being there, and wondering at it, as also being afraid to see it, for they would have had him to have bore a part in saying the words, in the room of one of the little girls that was so young that they could hardly make her learn to repeat the words, did, for fear there might be some slight used in it by the boy, or that the boy might be light, call the cook of the house, a very lusty fellow, as Sir G. Carteret's cook, who is very big and they did raise him just in the same manner. This is one of the strangest things I ever heard, but he tells it me of his own knowledge, and I do heartily believe it to be true. I inquired of him whether they were Protestant or Catholique girles; and he told me they were Protestant, which made it the more strange to me.' : him. When he is replaced in the chair, each of the four persons takes hold of the body as before; and the person to be lifted gives two signals, by clapping his lifters, begin to draw a long full breath; and when the hands. At the first signal, he himself, and the four inhalation is completed, or the lungs filled, the second signal is given for raising the person from the chair. To his own surprise, and that of his bearers, he rises with the greatest facility, as if he were no heavier than a feather. On several occasions, I have observed, that when one of the bearers performs his part ill by making the inhalation out of time, the part of the body which he tries to raise is left as it were behind. As you The have repeatedly seen this experiment, and performed the part both of the load and of the bearer, you can testify how remarkable the effects appear to all parties, and how complete is the conviction, either that the load has been lightened, or the bearer strengthened, by the prescribed process. At Venice the experiment was performed in a much more imposing manner. heaviest man in the party was raised and sustained upon the points of the forefingers of six persons. Major H. declared that the experiment would not succeed, if the person lifted were placed upon a board, and the strength of the individuals applied to the board. He conceived it necessary that the bearers should communicate directly with the body to be raised. "I have not had an opportunity of making any experiments relative to these curious facts: but whether the general effect is an illusion, or the result of known principles, the subject merits a careful investigation."] Minor Queries. De Sanctâ Cruce.-Can you inform me who is the author of a book entitled De Sanctâ Cruce; and what is the size and date? Are there not more than one under that title? I rather think that Gretser the Jesuit wrote such a book, but I have not been able to meet with it among the London booksellers. HUGO. Etymology of "Aghindle" or " Aghendole ?"— This is a small wooden measure containing eight pounds and a half, being the fourth part of the old peck of thirty-four pounds; and its use is now almost obsolete in those parts of Lancashire where it was formerly known. It is alluded to in the Notes of Pott's Discovery of Witches, edited by James Crossley, Esq., for the Chetham Society. F.R.R. In illustration of this passage LORD BRAYBROOKE adds, at vol. v. p. 245., the following note, which we insert, as it serves to bring before our readers evidence of this, at present, inexplicable fact on the authority of one of the most accomplished philosophers of our day: "The secret is now well known, and is described by Sir David Brewster, in his Natural Magic, p. 256. One of the most remarkable and inexplicable experiments relative to the strength of the human frame is that in which a heavy man is raised up the instant that his own lungs, and those of the persons who raise him, are inflated with air. This experiment was, I believe, first shown in England a few years ago by Major H., Pictures of Queen Elizabeth's Tomb.-Fuller, in who saw it performed in a large party at Venice, under his account of Queen Elizabeth, Church History, the direction of an officer of the American navy. As lib. x., says: Major H. performed it more than once in my presence, I shall describe as nearly as possible the method which he prescribed. The heaviest person in the company lies down upon two chairs, his legs being supported by the one, and his back by the other. Four persons, one at each leg, and one at each shoulder, then try to raise him; and they find his dead weight to be very great, from the difficulty they experience in supporting "Her corpse was solemnly interred under a fair tomb in Westminster, the lively draught whereof is pictured in most London, and many country churches, every parish being proud of the shadow of her tomb." Can any of your correspondents point out instances where these are still preserved ? T. STERNBERG. I beg to give you three references as a voucher of the fact. Mr. Cowdrey, the florist, who has large nursery gardens at Edgbaston, near Birmingham, has one specimen, with the history of which he is personally acquainted: no graft of the purple Cytisus has touched this tree. Mr. Holcombe of Valentines, near Ilford, has another specimen; and in my father's plantations at Kingsheath, near Birmingham, there are four trees of purple laburnum grafted on stocks of yellow laburnum; and of these, two have put forth the purple Cytisus in abundance. Let no one imagine that the purple Cytisus is merely a variety of the purple laburnum. It is, as I have said, specifically distinct. Its flowers do not grow in racemes, as in the two laburnums, but are on short footstalks all along the branch, with a very peculiar and small foliage springing from the same points of the branch. This fact can leave the problem of changes of species into species no longer of doubtful solution. Perhaps this note may lead to others of more scientific research. Surely a series of well-digested experiments would not merely confirm the facts already known, but lead to a rationale of the presumed transmutation. C. MANSFIELD INGLEBY. Minor Notes. Apuleius on Mesmerism. — I transcribe the folowing passage, which I have just met with in Apuleius, as a very early allusion to Mesmerism: "Quin et illud mecum reputo, posse animum humanum, præsertim puerilem et simplicem seu carminum avocamento, sive odorum delenimento, soporari, et ad oblivionem præsentium externari; et paulisper remota corporis memoriâ, redigi ac redire ad naturam suam, quæ est immortalis scilicet et divina: atque ita, veluti quodam sopore, futura rerum præsagire."-Apuleius, Apol. 475. Delph. ed. RECHABITE. The Domiciliary Clause. In 1547 a proclamation was issued by Henry VIII., "that all women should not meet together to babble and talk, and that all men should keep their wives in their houses." ALIQUIS. Transmission of Ancient Usages. To the derivation of certain customs and usages from the East via Gades or Cadiz, as in the case of the address "uncle" in Andalusia and Cornwall, and the clouted cream in Syria and Cornwall, may be added the use, in the same county, of a lock without wards actually now to be seen sculptured on the great temple of Karnac, in Egypt, too plainly to be mistaken. The principle is similar to that in one of Bramah's locks. Mr. Trevelyan some years ago brought this fact to the notice of the Royal Institution. The principle is not easily explained without an engraving. The voyages of Hamilcar and others to this part of England for tin is in this way remarkably corroborated, independently of that resemblance in domestic implements, and those of personal use, both in ancient and modern times, which may be traced in the antiquities collected in the British Museum. C. REDDING. Inscription on an Oak Chest.—I copy the following inscription from the lid of an old oak chest, measuring four feet eight inches and a half long, and two feet three inches and a half broad. The words are taken from Isaiah, chap. i. ver. 16, 17.: "1.5.9.1. CEASE. TO. DO. EVILL. LEARNE.TO.DO.GOOD SEKE.TO.DO.RIGHT.RELIVE.THE. POORE" The letters, it may be observed, are formed by brass-headed nails driven into the wood, in exactly the same manner as trunkmakers do at the present day, to ornament their boxes. It is the property of the Coopers' Company, and, from the spirit of the legend, I should say that it was formerly used to hold the documents relating to the various charities of which the Company are trustees. Kilburn. A. W. The Raising of Charles I.'s Standard at Nottingham. The frontispiece to Cattermole's Civil War represents a forlorn group of men, women, and children, watching the fixing into the ground of a large flag, which a soldier is seeking to strengthen by stakes driven round the base of the flagstaff. Surely this is not a correct delineation of that event? Rushworth, it is true, says the standard was fixed in an open field at the back side of the castle wall; but the common opinion, that its position was rather the summit of one of the old turrets of the castle, receives confirmation from a source little known to the public, viz. the memoranda of the antiquary, John Aubrey. In a letter sent to him by Sherrington Talbot (of Laycock ?), who was present at the "raising," the writer says that he saw the flag "lying horizontally on the tower;" this horizontal position being occasioned by the tempest which, it need hardly be added, cast the standard down almost as soon as erected. J. W. Queries. REMARKABLE EXPERIMENTS. A living man, lying on a bench, extended as a corpse, can be lifted with ease by the forefingers of two persons standing on each side, provided the lifters and the liftee inhale at the moment the effort is being made. If the liftee do not inhale, he cannot be moved off the bench at all; but the inhalation of the lifters, although not essential, seems to give additional power. The fact is undeniable. I have never met with |