176
NOTES AND QUERIES. [ii s. x. A. 29,
WILLIAM CARR, MAYOR OF LIVERPOOL
1741 (11 S. x. 131). Have the lists of wills
proved at Chester about the date in question
been consulted in the Record Society's
volumes ? I see wills of William Carr of
Liverpool, merchant, 1754 ; Laurence Carr
of same, 1762 ; Edward Carr of same,
mariner, 1710 ; and several others from
Liverpool and places round Chester. I
noticed no Stephen Carr.
A pedigree of the Gildarts would be interesting. Surely your correspondent is in error in saying J. Gildart, Mayor in 1786, was a brother of Mrs. Carr. Her brother James was Mayor in 1750, and it was his son of the same name who was Mayor in 1786. B. S. B.
" MEMMIAN NAPHTHA-PITS " IN TENNYSON : MEDICINAL MUMMIES (11 S. ix. 67, 70, 115, 137, 157, 195, 316). MR. J. B. WILLIAMS asked at the second reference whence, why, and where dead bodies could have been used for medicine. Curiously enough, MR. L. B. M. STRACHAN in the same number, puzzled by " Memmian naphtha -pits " in Tennyson's less-known sonnet, asks (p. 67) whether " Memnonian " can possibly be the real reading. Tennyson admittedly is, as a rule, accurate. In these connexions " Memmia sedificia " stated to be found in ' Paulus apud Festum ' might be taken as asphalted or bitumened brick buildings, and " hence or otherwise " might explain Tennyson's transference of the rare adjective " Memmian " to his naphtha- pits. I confess that as a close student of Tennyson I feel inclined to hazard a guess in textual criticism, not to say prosody (which " Memnonian " violates, I think), and to ask whether in this less-printed, less- published sonnet the true reading may not have been " Mummy and Naphtha pits," which solution, I hope, is sufficiently close to what " nice " scholars classically love to term the " ductus literarum." Further, the query occurs to me, Did Tennyson write "&" or "and" in his MSS. generally, or here incidentally ? If so, my emendation of " mummy and " naphtha pits may be put forward with more assurance.
But to return to my mutton, or in this case mummy, it is somewhat tiring how- ever great an admiration one may have for the ' N.E.D.' (its pronunciation always excepted, because here I follow the strictures of the present Poet Laureate as sound) to note the indolent neglect with which Oriental philology is treated, even in the simplest terms. In the ' N.E.D.' Persian (!) is quoted
as the source of " mummy " ; but no
evidence is adduced. Far more evidence is
there, indeed, for supposing " mummy " to
of Egyptian origin, merman, of Aman,
Aman's property, protected, sanctified ;
' preserved " for ever from harm, cured,
laved. As to the eating of mummy, on
- he assumption that " you eat the best, and
what you eat does you good," the accounts of passages in reference to " mummy " in
- he ' N.E.D.' easily enable an inquisitive
and curious outsider " to get the hang of the hing." Let us see. First, in 1400, we have ^anfranc's ' Cirurg.,' 153, "Take mummie 3ss." In 1525 Jerome of Brunswick, ' Surg.,' )3, " Take mumie." Hakluyt in his ' Voyages/ ii. 1. 201, says : "These dead bodies are the Mummie which the Phisitians and Apothe- aries doe against our willes make us to
- wallow." (We may note that mummy is.
also, when ground up and pounded, a paint still used by modern painters.) Blount in 1656, in his ' Glossographia,' says : " Mumie is digged out of the Graves [Egyptian] of those bodies that were embalmed .... Arabian mummie. The second kind is onely an equal mixture of the Jews Lime and Bitu- men." In 1755 we find Swift suggesting medicinally " the mummy of some deceased moderator of the general assembly in,] Scotland to be taken inwardly as an effectual antidote against Antichrist." In 17 86 Beckford in his ' Vathek ' says : " My taste for dead bodies and everything" like mummy is decided." Shakespeare's " mountain of mummie " in ' Merry Wives,' III. v. 18, also refers ad rem. Wiedemann the Egyptologist produced an article in the Zeitschrift for 1906 entitled ' Mumie als Heilmittel.'
MR. J. B. WILLIAMS'S inquiry, then, as to the colonel who believed and practised these methods falls within the limits of ordinary experience. As touching Shakespeare's witchcraft of " liver of blaspheming Jew " and the mid-nineteenth-century fight be- tween allceopathic and homoeopathic chem- ists and apothecaries, or sympathetic sur- geons and chemists, readers of Early-Vic- torian reviews or magazines will recollect pictorial chemists' advertisements therein : " Don't go to the fellow over the road j he 's an Homoeopath. He '11 give you what you 've had already again ! " &c. The root-idea seems to have been that Egyptian natron, asphalt, and bitumen, or mummy (as Herodotus first tells, apart from the Bible), inherently and subsequently pos- sessed a medicinal principle which, partaken by the invalid, produced in him and for him
