OF ARTS AND SCIENCES. 211 



" Among the earliest names conferred by Columbus, in his first 

 voyage, on islands in the West Indies, was Tortuga ; * and the abun- 

 dance and enormous size of the sea-tortoises there, and the supply of 

 food they furnished to the mariners and first settlers, caused them to 

 figure afterwards in the Spanish accounts of their transactions in the 

 New World. 



In 1554, on the solemn entry into London of Philip the Second and 

 Queen Mary, just after their marriage, Richard Eden, transported, as 

 he says, by the magnificence of the scene, determined to make his 

 countrymen acquainted with the exploits of Spain in the New World, 

 and immediately translated the ' Decades ' of Peter Martyr, and Ovi- 

 edo's ' Natural History of the Indies,' which, in one volume, he pre- 

 sented to Philip and Mary in 1555. This book contains, probably, 

 the first printed account in the English language of the West Indian 

 tortoise, and furnishes the earliest use of the word to which this inves- 

 tigation has led.f Where Oviedo says, ' En la ysla de Cuba se hallan 

 tan grandes tortugas que diez y quinze hombres son necesarios para 

 sacar del agua una dellas,' Eden translates thus : ' In the island of 

 Cuba we found great tortoyses {ivJiich are certain shell-fishes) of such 

 byggenesse that ten or fifteene men are scarcely able to lift one of 

 them out of the water.' The explanatory words, inserted by the trans- 

 lator in a parenthesis for the benefit of English readers, seem to show 

 that the term was either wholly new to the language, and coined by 



* Spanish etymologists are not agreed on the origin of this word, early applied 

 to the Mediterranean tortoise on the coast of Spain. (See Cobarruvias.) It is com- 

 monly referred, with the Italian tartaruga and the French tortiie, to the Latin tortus, 

 as importing the crookedness of the animal's legs. (See Diez, Etym. Worterbuch.) 



Afterwards the Spanish also gave their name of the land-tortoise (galdpago) to 

 a group of islands off the Western coast of America, abounding in gigantic animals 

 , of the sort. Spanish etymologists consider this word as belonging to the Arabic 

 portion of their language ; and from it came, through sailors, our name denoting 

 the upper shell, calUpash (at first written, nautice, "galley patch"), softened by the 

 French into carapace (which English naturalists now begin to adopt), and further 

 transformed into carapax, -acis, as a Latin noun of the third declension, by a French 

 naturalist, to enrich, as he says, that language for the use of his hrethren. — Callipee, 

 which is found used as early as 1657, by Lygon in his "History of Barbados," 

 seems to he a word coined by cooks in the West Indies, as a convenient counter- 

 part to calUpash, to distinguish the under from the upper shell : — " Lifting up 

 his belly, which we call his caUipee." 



t Thirty years earlier than Kichardson's earliest citation, which purports to con- 

 tain the earliest instance known to him. 



