422
NOTES AND QUERIES. [9* s. v. MAY 26, im
plete the collection of 1673 show the titles of
the different plays upon a second front-leaf.
The fourth volume contains (1) " * Le Sicilien ;
ou, 1'Ainour Peintre,' de premiere edition,
1668"; (2) " ' Amphitryon,'de premiere edition,
1668 " (3) " ' Le Mariage Force,' de premiere
edition, 1668, chez Jean Kibou." The third
edition of 1674-76 contains the whole of the
twenty-three plays published during Moliere's
lifetime. (See 'Notice Bibliographique ' in
vol. xi. of Despois and Mesnard's edition of
Moliere, pp. 56-64.) H. KKEBS.
Oxford.
"OUT or PRINT" (9 th S. v. 124, 195, 343). MR. MAXWELL is absolutely incorrect in his surmise that I do not understand the mean- ing of the phrase " Out of print," and I i^- iterate " Out of print " is generally under- stood. MR. MAXWELL writes as if stereotype plates were generally used for book printing. This is not the case. Ninety-nine out of every hundred books are printed direct from the type ; with newspapers it is different. MR. MAXWELL also makes the statement that "a book is in print so long as the
- publisher ' has copies unsold." Scores of
authors when embarking upon a literary venture do not send the publisher half the impression, so if the publisher has sold out, it is not to say that the writer has.
CHAS. F. FORSHAW, LL.D. Bradford.
FAHRENHEIT THERMOMETER (6 th S. iii. 507 ; iv. 213 ; v. 79, 196 ; vi. 116 ; 9 th S. v. 229, 289). Permit me to protest against R. B.'s sugges- tion to call the boiling-point of water 180. This would be to lose the chief advantage of our present scale, and introduce new con- fusion. That the difficulty of avoiding con- fusion with negative numbers is real, this may be taken as proof. I remember in Switzerland many years ago that in tele- graphing the weather reports they used and printed 99 for- 1 C., 100 for 0, 101 for + 1, and so on. What is the authority for saying that Fahrenheit was F.R.S. ? Chalmers's
- Dictionary of Biography ' does not mention
his visiting England. T. WILSON.
Harpenden.
DECLARATORY ACT (9 th S. v. 337). Does H. T. B. seek the terms of the original Act or of Chatham's Bill for its repeal? The Declaratory Act (1766), setting forth the absolute rights of England over her Ame- rican colonies, was the work of the Rock- ingham ministry. The main point was the right of taxation, which Chatham opposed. It was followed by the repeal of the Stamp
Actthoroughly "English" procedure the
thoroughly un-English book of Sir G. O.
Trevelyan calls the order in which the Acts
were passed. On 26 May, 1774, Chatham in
a great speech denied the right to tax. A
motion on somewhat similar lines was
defeated (20 January, 1775). After consulting
Franklin, who certainly did not desire peace
and played the hypocrite as usual, Chatham
introduced a Bill (10 February) which set
forth the rights of England over her colonies,
out disclaimed that of taxation, i.e., repealed
the Declaratory Act. Other obnoxious
measures were to be abolished, and a Con-
gress of the American states summoned to
accept the modified declaration arid to
arrange for a set sum to be paid to the king.
Chatham's Bill was thrown out, but he had
it printed and circulated as an appeal from
the House of Lords to the people.
GEORGE MARSHALL. Seftori Park, Liverpool.
GREEN FAIRIES : WOOLPIT GREEN CHILDREN (9 th S. v. 47, 155). The story "De quodam puero et puella de terra emergentibus " leads MR. HOOPER to ask, " Is there any parallel to this strange history in the folk-tales of any other country ? " Something analogous I find related by Peter Heylin in his * Cosmo- graphie ' in the ' Chorographie of Egypt,' book iv. p. 8. He says :
' That which I look on as a rarity of the greatest moment, if not rather to be accounted supernatural, is that about five miles from the city of Cairo there is a place in which on every Good Friday yearly there appear the heads, legs, and arms of men rising out of the ground to a very great number, which, it a man draw near unto them to touch any of them, will shrink again into the earth, supposed by some to be an imposture of some watermen only, who stick them overnight in the sands, and, keeping them secret to themselves, obtain thereby the ferrying over of many thousands of people to behold the sight. But Stephen Dupleix, a sober and dis- cerning man in the opinion of Goulartius, who reports it from him, conceived otherwise of it, affirming surely that he was an eyewitness of the wonder that he had touched divers of these rising members, and that, as he was once so doing to the head of a child, a man of Cairo cried out to him, ' Kali, kali ! ante materasde,' that is to say, ' Hold, hold ! you know not what you do.' A strange forerunner (if it be of undoubted credit) of the Resurrection of the whole body, presented yearly in the rising of these several parts.
JAMES D. BUTLER. Madison, Wis., U.S.
" STAND THE RACKET " (9 th S. v. 316). " Stand " in this phrase is evidently an ab- breviation of "withstand," and a "racket" is a noise resembling that produced by playing the ball with the racket in the game of tennis
