406
NOTES AND QUERIES. rio s. XL MAY 22, im.
requisite to lay aside " this punishment.
Ollyffe was born in 1682 : the passage shows
that the punishment was not forgotten at
the beginning of the eighteenth century.
There is a strange recurrence of a form of words in the references to this sentence : they all bear a resemblance to Harrison's
- ' so continue th till his bones consume to
nothing. This similitude seems to be more than accidental. Some day perhaps an old sentence may be unearthed. We shall then probably find that it ran in a form which suggested Harrison's wording.
ALFRED MARKS.
In 1870 I spent a holiday in Penrith with an antiquarian friend, and in one of our long walks he pointed out a lonely place where, he said, a murder was committed {in the eighteenth century, I think), and where the murderer was gibbeted alive. He said that the man survived for some days, and added a circumstantial detail of his latter moments which need not be recorded here. My friend, of course, might have been credulous, but the story was obviously there.
As to the point that the punishment was too cruel to be carried out, one has only to read of the barbarities experienced by the early Quakers in their imprisonments to realize that our ancestors were not squeamish. DIEGO.
CASTOR OIL. The ' N.E.D.' says :
" Origin of name uncertain : it has been suggested,
that this oil actually took the place of the drug
pastor, or perh. of oil of castor (see Castor *5), in use
in midwifery, etc., and thus popularly assumed its
name.
This suggested origin seems to me very unlikely. Neither in appearance nor in properties is there a sufficient resemblance between the two drugs to make it probable ; and oil of Castor had virtually gone out of use long before Castor oil became at all popular. A much more likely origin is mentioned in Can vane's ' Dissertation on the Oleum Palmae Christi, sive Oleum Ricini ; or (as it is commonly call'd) Castor Oil,' but is ignored in the ' Dictionary,' though the title of the treatise is quoted as affording the first known occurrence of " Castor oil " as applied to Oleum Ricini. Canvane says the French of the West Indies, where the oil was first used medicinally, sometimes call the plant from which it is derived (which he calls Ricinus Americanus major) the Agnus Castus, perhaps on account of its virtue in curing febrile heats, " and
especially the heats of Venery " ; and he
adds : " From whence, I suppose, the people
of St. Christopher's have by a corruption of
Agnus Castus called it Castor oil." He
refers to a somewhat earlier treatise than
his own on the same subject, by Mr. Fraser,
surgeon to his Majesty's troops in Antigua,
contributed to " the Medical Essays of
London," failing which, Canvane himself is
apparently our chief authority for the early
history of castor oil as a drug for internal
use. Clearly it was mainly through him
that it came into use in England, and
probably in Europe generally, for following
his treatise in the same volume in the
British Museum is another in Latin, printed
at Freiburg in 1780, which is mainly derived
from his. The date of his treatise is 1766.
C. C. B.
COLERIDGE AS AN ART-CRITIC. I have to record an unfortunate error in connexion with the marginalia recently printed by me in ' N. & Q.' under the above title (see ante. pp. 181, 341). The book containing them (Allan Cunningham's ' Lives of the British Painters,' 1829) is placed in the British Museum Library Catalogue in the list of books containing marginal notes by Coleridge, and I was misled in the first instance by this entry into thinking that the notes were his. The handwriting resembles Coleridge's, and the notes seemed to me, both as regards style and matter, characteristic of him, and thus no doubts arose in my mind about them. But the fact is, as a reader of ' N. & Q.' has pointed out, that these marginalia were written, not by S. T. Coleridge, but by his son Hartley, and that they have already appeared in ' Essays and Marginalia by H. C.' (edited by Derwent Coleridge, London, 1851), a book with which I was not acquainted. The notes will there be found printed entirely or almost in full ; the handwriting would, no doubt, be much less difficult to decipher then than now.
I have drawn the attention of the proper authorities to the error in the Catalogue, and to the fact (which escaped my notice when I transcribed the notes) that the name of Hartley Coleridge, as their author, is actually written at the back of the volume.
In conclusion, I must apologize to those readers of ' N. & Q.' whom I may have misled for thus propagating the original error. J. SHAWCROSS.
" SKIM THE SEA." In modern French, German, and Dutch a " skimmer of the sea " means, or meant, a pirate, a rover ; in Mid.
