504 



NOTES AND QUERIES. 



[No. 296. 



Marteaus, or of books bearing their name. Where 

 was Hibernia Dominicana really published ? and 

 was Cologne a place selected for the publication 

 of hazardous theology in the last century ? 



H. B. C. 

 U. U. Club, 



" The L'on Mask." — Can you tell me where I 

 may find information as to the conjectures which 

 have been hazarded with respect to that mys- 

 terious personage, " The Man with the Iron 

 Mask?" Qu^sTOR. 



[Particulars respecting this mysterious personage will 

 be found in The True History of the State Frisoner, com- 

 monly called the Iron Mask, by the Hon. George Agar 

 Ellis, Lord Dover, 8vo., 1826. His lordship makes the 

 following statement in his preface : — "I was led to 

 undertake the following narrative by the perusal of a 

 work lately published at Paris, entitled Uistoire de 

 V Homme au Masque de Fer, par J. Delort ; in which the 

 name of that state prisoner is most clearly and satis- 

 factorily ascertained by means of authentic documents."] 



Cornarium : Snorell. — In an old document of 

 1458 I find a person occupying a tenement 

 " super cornarium apud Snorell cross." Can any 

 of your readers suggest a derivation for the name 

 of this cross (perhaps the corruption of St. some- 

 body), and also favour me with a translation for 

 cornarium ? J. 



\_Cornarium, or Cornerium, upon or at the comer, is 

 nothing more than the English word with a Latin termi- 

 nation. Corneria, or Cornerium, i. e. angulus, cornicre, 

 acoording to Du Cange, in his Glossary of mediaeval 

 Latinity : " De servitio super quodam cornerio nemoris," 

 &C., a quotation from a charter of 1424. — Snorell seems 

 a corruption of Snore-Hall, a village in Norfolk, in the 

 parish of Fordham ; but J., however, does not state the 

 locality. " Snore was a village in the Confessor's time ; 

 nothing of it remains but part of an old hall, now a farm- 

 house, lying east of Fordham." — Blomfield's Norfolk, 

 edit. 1775, vol. iv. p. 113.] 



" Polyanthea.'" — Who was the editor or author 

 of The Polyanthea, a miscellany of odds and ends, 

 bibliographical collections, &c., published Lond. 

 1804 ? C. Clifton Barry. 



[Charles Henry Wilson of the Middle Temple. He 

 was also author of the Wandering Islander, Broohiana, 

 &c., to none of which would he suffer his name to be pre- 

 fixed. See a notice of him in *he Gent. Mag. for May, 

 1808, p. 469.] 



" Cocoa Tree Coffee-home" — Where was the 

 " Cocoa Tree Cofiee-house," mentioned in the 

 Spectator, Xo. I. E. W. O. 



CamberwelL 



[This Tory chocolate-house of Queen Anne's time was 

 in St. James's Street, Piccadilly. It was afterwards trans- 

 formed into a club, in the same way that White's choco- 

 late-house, in the same street, became, what it still is, 

 "White's Club." — Cunningham's London.'] 



Mum Chance. — When a child I often heard 

 people say, when any one was condemned unjustly, 

 " He is like Mum Chance, who was hanged for 

 saying nothing." Can any of the readers of " N. 

 & Q." tell me who was Mum Chance, and what 

 was the origin of the saying ? Ruby. 



[Mumchance is a provincialism for a silent, stupid 

 person : a fool. It is also the name of an old game, in 

 which silence was an indispensable requisite. See Halli- 

 well's Dictionary. "} 



ANTICIPATED INVENTIONS, ETC. 

 (Vol. xi., p. 459.) 



The book which your correspondent cites from 

 is one of the editions of the collection of arith- 

 metical and other recreations by Henry Van 

 Etten, who describes himself as of the famous 

 university of Pont a Mousson. I know nothing of 

 Van Etten, and nothing of his work in French.; 

 but there are English translations, one of 1633, 

 another of 1653. To the second is attached a 

 work of Oughtred, whose name is so conspicuous 

 in the title-page, that rapid cataloguers make him 

 the author. Ozanam founded his work of recrea- 

 tions on Van Etten ; Montucla made a new book 

 of Ozanam by large additions; and Mutton did 

 the same by Montucla. So that Button's well- 

 known book is at the end of the chain, of which 

 Ysjs\ Etten's is at the beginning. 



The cBolipile of Van Etten is but an imperfect 

 account of that of Heron of Alexandria, whose 

 steam-engine may be seen in the translation of 

 Heron's Pneumatics, lately made for and printed 

 by Mr. Bennet Woodcroft (p. 72.). The work of 

 Heron had fallen so much out of sight, that 

 Dutens, the learned author of the Origine des 

 Decouvertes attribuees aux modernes, had never 

 seen it, and therefore missed Heron's (Bolipile, 

 which he would have been highly pleased to have 

 set up as the original steam-engine. Dutens 

 (1729—1812), the editor of Leibnitz, was, though 

 a foreigner, an English clergyman, and rector of 

 Elsdon in Northumberland. He loved the an- 

 cients, bodies and souls; and having found a 

 tooth in Italy which he thought he could prove to 

 have belonged to the great Scipio, he made it do 

 duty in his own mouth. There must be some 

 septuagenarians alive who knew M. Duten, and 

 could give some anecdotes of hira ; it is impossible 

 that biting his crusts with one of Scipio's teeth 

 should have been any man's only eccentricity. 



To return to Van Etten. The English trans- 

 lations have it in the title-page that the work was 

 " written first in Greeke and Latine, lately com- 

 piled in French." This means that the materials 

 are found in old writers. The work of M. Dutens 



