210 PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY 



" Another instance, belonging to a period hardly later than the 

 fourteenth century, appears in a treatise on the Art of War, in which 

 the testudo, the Roman military contrivance used in attacking walled 

 towns, is thus described : ' They had also all manere of gynes [engines] 

 .... that nedful is [in] taking or seging of castel or of citee, as snayles, 

 that was nought else but .... targetis, under the which men, when 

 they foughten, were heled [protected], .... as the snayl is in his house ; 

 therefore they clepid them snayles.^ * 



" It would seem, therefore, that snail (Anglo-Saxon sncsgel) was, in 

 the state of our language at that time, of necessity used to embrace 

 also the tortoise, as a creeping thing covered with a shell. f This com- 

 prehensive meaning was inserted in the earliest dictionaries (English- 

 Latin), and, through the conservatism of lexicographers, has been kept 

 in all subsequent dictionaries of the kind, down to the present day.J 

 That this meaning had not quite died out of literature at the close 

 of the seventeenth century, is evident from more than one example. 

 Howell, for instance, in 1660, says that ' Apelles used to paint a good 

 housewife upon a snayl,' to intimate that she should be silent and 

 'home-keeping.' Dryden, in 1693, has an unequivocal passage in 

 the Dedication of his ti-anslation of Juvenal. He says, that ' When 

 he had once enjoyned himself so hard a task, he then considered the 

 Greek proverb^ "HSet x^^<^^^s '^P^'" (^ayei", rj fifj cpaydv,^ that he must 

 either eat the whole S7iail, or let it quite alone ' ; — no great feat 

 surely, if a modern snail were meant. 



" If, then, the word tortoise was not a denizen of the English lan- 

 guage in the time of Mandeville, when did it first make its appearance, 

 and from what quarter ? 



* As quoted by Halliwell from a manuscript. 



t A precisely analogous case is afforded in the word worm, which in Anglo- 

 Saxon and early English comprehended also serpents ; and Cffidmon, in his para- 

 phrase of Scripture, makes Eve listen to the wyrmes geweaht, " counsel of the 

 worm" (Milton's "false worm"). So Shakspeare's "mortal worm," and "the 

 pretty worm of Nilus " on the breast of Cleopatra. A trace of this use still lingers 

 in modern English, in the name of the blind-worm or slow-worm, which passes for 

 a serpent. 



} Barret's "Alvearie" (1575), as re-editcd by Fleming in 1580: " Snaile, 

 limax, testudo, cochlea." So Rider, Gouldmann, Littleton, Ilolyoke, and Ains- 

 worth (even in the latest editions). And Minshew, in his Spanish Dictionary 

 (1G17), has " GalApago, tortoise, snail." 



§ A gastronomic precept, preserved in Athenreus, which passed into a proverb, 

 like Pope's "Drink deep, or taste not." 



