272 



NOTES AND QUERIES. 



[2nd s. NO 66., ArKiL 4. '57. 



nastery of St. Edmund's Bury, in the following 



words : 



" Pede meo pprio hoc scripsi. 

 Wretyn by me Xpofor Well's, 

 ay' my foot' and nothyng els. 



A" dfii 1659 vltimo Augusti." 



It is difficult to say whether these assertions are 

 to-be taken an pied de la le.ttre or not ; but it is 

 well known that some persons have been able to 

 write with their feet, and in Walpole's Anecdotes 

 of Painting, vol. i. p. 160., edit. 1849, mention is 

 made of an artist named Cornelius Ketel, who 

 painted portraits with his fingers and with his 

 toes. 



A curious article might be drawn up on the 

 metrical lines and memoranda which the scribes of 

 manuscripts were accustomed to attach to the vo- 

 lumes on which they had been employed ; and in 

 Cooper's Appendix to his Report on the Fcedera, 

 vol. A. p. 147., many specimens of these are given, 

 collected from Feller's Catalogue of the MSS. at 

 Leipzig, but the number might be considerably 

 augmented. Among them is the following distich : 



" Scribere qui nescit, nullum credit esse laborem, 

 Tres digiti scribunt, dum caetera membra quiescunt." 



Or, as it is written at the end of a fine MS. of the 

 eleventh century in the Old Royal Collection, 

 British Museum, 6 A. vi. : 



" Tres digiti scribunt, totum corpusque laborat, 

 Scribere qui nescit, nullum putat esse laborem." 



The editors of the French edition of Silvestre's 

 Paleographie Unicerselle cite a still earlier instance 

 of the employment of this phrase by the scribe of 

 a MS. of the Latin Gospels, of the seventh century, 

 preserved at Munich : 



"Cul tores et legentes, mementote mei peccatori[s], 

 quia tribtis digitis scribitur, et lotus merabrus liborat {sic)." 



But they understand the words literally, and 

 point out to us the curious fact (!) that the scribe 

 had only three fingers on the hand with which he 

 wrote the volume ! How then would they explain 

 another sentence written by a scribe in one of the 

 Leipzig MSS. ? 



" Finivi librum totum sine manibus istuni." 



Unless this scribe also wrote with his foot, I see 

 not how it is to be understood, except by a quibble, 

 which it no doubt is. F. Madden. 



IMPOSSIBLE PEOBIiEMS. 



(2a^S. iii. 11.) 



I have waited to reply to Mr. Ingleby's ques- 

 tions until I could look again at one or two points, 

 and also until I could put together a few remarks 

 on the general subject, which is one of much 

 curiosity, and continually recurring inquiry. I 



must, however, premise that the remarks are not 

 addressed to, or at, Mr. Ingleby ; not that I 

 think he would suppose such a thing, but because 

 people find out such curious meanings, that, with- 

 out this warning, I should not be surprised if I 

 heard that Mb. Ingleby had been squaring at the 

 circle, and that I had been squaring at him for it. 



When we find a long and enduring discussion 

 about any point of speculation, we naturally ask 

 whether there be not some verbal difficulty at the 

 bottom. What is the solution of a problem ? It 

 is the showing how to arrive at a desired result, 

 under prescribed conditions as to the means which 

 are to be used, and as to the form in which the re- 

 sult is to be presented. There are then three pos- 

 sibilities of impossibility. The desired result may 

 be among non-existing things ; the prescribed con- 

 ditions may be insufficient ; the form demanded * 

 may be necessarily unattainable. And any one of 

 these things being really the case, it may be impos- 

 sible to demonstrate that it is the case. Human 

 nature, which always assumes that it can know 

 whatever can be known, must bear to be told that 

 this assumption may be one of its little mistakes, 

 or may be a true exposition of its own powers, 

 and may be a matter on which no certainty can be 

 arrived at. 



In prescribing conditions of solution, and form 

 of result, we dictate to existence : we determine 

 that our mental nature shall be so constructed 

 that we shall know beforehand what means are 

 wanted, and what form the result shall appear in, 

 the matter being one on which the very necessity 

 of proposing the problem shows our ignorance. 

 And when we fail, we quarrel with the universe. 

 As Porson did, when he proposed to himself the 

 problem of taking up the candlestick, his condition 

 being that in*which two images of objects appear, 

 one the consequence of the laws of light, the other 

 what a psychologist would perhaps call purely 

 subjective. He accordingly handled the wrong 

 image, which of course did not prevent his fingers 

 from meeting. Incensed at this, he exclaimed, 

 " D — the nature of things." He had better have 

 attended to those preliminaries under which so 

 simple a problem ipight have been solved without 

 a quadratic equation. 



IJndoubtedly the dictation of conditions and of 

 form has been attended with the most advantage- 

 ous results. Abundance of possibles have been 

 turned up in digging for impossibles. Alchemy 

 invented chemistry ; astrology greatly improved 

 astronomy ; the effort to find a certainty of win- 

 ning in gambling nurtured the science under 

 which insurance is safe and intelligible, and the 

 inscrutable Inquiry into ens qualcnus ens, so pro- 

 perly placed /iera ra (pvcrtKa, has added much to 

 our power of investigating homo quatenns homo. 



There was a separate dictation of conditions in 

 arithmetic and in geometry. In arithmetic, the 



