obvious is the remark that Dr. Wallis must have read the inscription with an eye prepared to view in it Arabic numerals that should strengthen his favourite hypothesis. And afterwards, he must have trusted to memory for what he imagined he had seen; for had he compared the drawing with the original, he could not have failed observing that there was a striking dissimilitude between them.
After repeatedly inspecting the plates exhibited by Wallis and Ward, to me it appeared likely that they both looked for the character specifying the century in the wrong compartment, and Mr. Gough's fac simile convinces me that I was not mistaken. It is not, as conceived by Wallis, a single character in the first panel, there being clearly three distinct characters. All, I believe, will agree the first of them to be designed for M, though it is an uncouth letter. As to the second, I can only say that it is not more unlike 5 than the two figures in the third panel are unlike threes, and that the chisel seems to have been used in reverting instead of inverting the lower extremities of these figures. Somewhat apt am I to think that the second character might be meant for 4, and this under a notion the artist might have, that as L was a customary mark of fifty, by placing C a little way from the summit of it, it would be understood to signify 500; this C, however, adds weight to my conjecture, that as M, the first character is obviously the initial of mille, the thoufandth year, so the second ought to be interpreted to denote the succeeding centuries.
Mr. Gough acknowledges himself to be puzzled how to make Anno Domini out of the fragments of the letters, though this would have been plain to him had not the wainscot concealed the tops of them, as also the i and o that are visible in the engravings. But I apprehend myself to be fully warranted in suggesting that had it not been for the intermediate Do and Ann, it would not have been an easy task to have discovered from such pot-hooks and hangerswhether
