

White. — The Horse : a Study in Philology. 213 



around the jaw-bone of the horse, the vacancy between the 

 teeth of the horse being specially arranged, as it were, to 

 accommodate this practice. I can distinctly remember the 

 time when a peculiar formation of horse-hair rope was used to 

 hobble or tie together the tail and hind-legs of cows when 

 they were being milked in the open field. Then, we have 

 chev-ille, a peg, pin, or bolt ; chev-iller, to peg, to fasten with a 

 peg ; chev-illot, a toggle (the nautical term for a belaying-pin) ; 

 chev-ill-ure, the branches on the horns of a deer, such being 

 useful to the Palaeolithic man as pins, pegs, and other tools. 



Several of these words may indicate the necessity of hold- 

 ing the horse in restraint, such as the tethering of the animal 

 with a long rope made of hair, at the further extremity of 

 which would be a pin or peg driven firmly into the ground. If 

 the horse was hobbled, a bone or wooden toggle would be 

 used, in place of the buckle of to-day, to pass through the 

 loop on either hobble, which was made of hair, or otherwise of 

 raw hide. In hobbling the cow as mentioned above a similar 

 toggle locked the short rope of hair after it had been passed 

 several times round the beast's hind legs. I should say that 

 the whole method of this proceeding, and the outfit, were 

 remainders from bygone days, previous to the date when man 

 discovered the use of iron and other metals. 



La chev-ille des pied, the ankle (literally, the peg, pin, or 

 bolt of the feet). At or near this part of a man the shackles 

 (fer or chames) were fastened on the prisoner, the equivalent 

 to hobbles ; but jambe is the shank, and the shank-bone, or 

 tibia, is os de la jambe (or, literally, bone of the shank). This 

 bone of the horse is named canon, which we also use in our 

 term " cannon-bone." Skeat derives canon through Anglo- 

 Saxon canon ; Latin, canon, a rule ; Greek, kovwv, a rod or 

 rule, Kavrj, a (straight) cane. The cannon of war he derives 

 through French canon, originally a gun-barrel, through or con- 

 nected with Latin canna, a reed. I would assume this reed 

 equivalent to a bamboo rod. 



The French words are rather confusing in these terms as 

 to what particular part of the leg is meant, for cheville du pied 

 is the ankle, while qui a rapport aux chevilles is ankled (lite- 

 rally, that which is connected with the ankles) ; cou de pied 

 (literally, neck of the foot) is the ankle-joint, but the ankle- 

 bone is astragale, which, I suppose, is not the tibia, mentioned 

 previously, but the part known anatomically under its Latin 

 name talus, the ankle-bone (of animals, the pastern-bone or 

 knuckle-bone). Talus was also used to denote the heel or 

 foot. It would seem that in olden times this bone was used 

 in place of dice- — talaris, pertaining to the ankles, also to dice. 

 These must be the bones — if I remember correctly five was 

 the number — used by schoolboys to play knuckle-bone. 



