SHELL-FISH 



SHENANDOAH 



389 



works is of great value. The most complete one-volume 

 edition of the poetical works is that by the present 

 writer (Professor Dowden), who has also written the fullest 

 and most exact Life of Shelley ( 2 vols. 188ti ). Mrs 

 Julian Marshall has written a valuable Life of Mary 

 Wollstonecraft Shelley ( 2 vols. 1889 ) ; and there is a 

 short Life of her by Mrs TV. M. Rossetti. Short lives 

 of Shelley have been written by Mr Symonds, Mr Ros- 

 setti, Mr Salt, and Mr \V. Sharp, and by the poet's 

 daughter-in-law, Lady Shelley. Hogg's Life of Shelley 

 is excellent for the months at Oxford. Trelawny's 

 Records gives a vivid picture of Shelley during his last 

 days. Dr Garnett's Kelio of Shelley gave for the first 

 time many pieces recovered from MSS. The same care- 

 ful editor has superintended an admirable selection from 

 Shelley's Letters (1882). Mr Forman's Shelley Biblio- 

 yraphy ( 1882 ) is full and accurate. The publications of 

 the ' Shelley Society ' include reprints of several rare 

 editions. An admirable Lexical Concordance to Shelley's 

 poems was published by Mr F. S. Ellis in 1892. 



Shell-fish, a popular term for many aquatic 

 animals not fishes (in the sense in which the word 

 1 fish ' is now understood); especially oysters, 

 cliiins anil all molluscs, and crustaceans such as 

 crabs and lobsters. 



Shell-lac. See LAC. 



Shells. See SHELL. 



Shell-sand. Sand consisting in great part of 

 fragments of shells, and often containing a small 

 proportion of organic matter, is a very useful 

 manure, particularly for clay soils, heavy loams, 

 and newly-reclaimed bogs. It is also advantage- 

 ously applied to any soil deficient in lime. It 

 neutralises the organic acids which abound in 

 peat, and forms witli them compounds which 

 serve as food for plants. Great deposits of shell- 

 sand are found on the coaste of Devonshire and 

 Cornwall, and are of much value in the agricul- 

 ture of that district. Shell-sand is also found on 

 iii.uiy other parts of the British coast, and no- 

 where more abundantly than in the Outer 

 Hebrides. The sand of many parts of the coast 

 being mostly siliceous is incapable of the same 

 use. Shell-mind is much used as a manure in 

 some of the maritime districts of France, as 

 Bretagne and Normandy. 



Shelta. or SHELRU, is a secret jargon of great 

 antiquity spoken by Irish tinkers, beggars, and 

 pipers, the descendants of the ancient ceards and 

 bards. The word Shelru is a perversion of the 

 Irish bfulra, 'language.' Shelta is otherwise 

 known as 'Cainnt cheard,' ' Minkur-tharal,' '(Jam 

 (or (iamoch) cant,' ' Bog-latin, 'and ' Bear!' eagair.' 

 Fur use of last name see Gaelic Dictionary of the 

 lli'ililittul^ Society (1828), i. 113: ' " Beurl' eagair " 

 or " Laidionn nan ceard," the gibberish of tinkers : 

 fignlorum stribligo ; dialectus qua utuntur ollaruin 

 sartores circnmforanei ; ' also i. 548 : ' Gibberish : 

 mendii'orum et nebulonuin ex compacto sermo, 

 barbaries. ' Bearla eagair (i.e. 'vernacular') thus 

 used must not be confounded with Bearlagair na 

 saor (mason's jargon), a few words of which are 

 given by MacElligott (Dublin Gaelic Society, 1808). 

 The earliest specimens of this idiom, collected 

 ( 1877-80 ) by Mr C. G. Leland from an English 

 vajjrant in North Wales and an Irish tinker in 

 Philadelphia, are published in The Gypsies, pp. 

 354-372. The investigation of Shelta was con- 

 tinued l>y Mr I). Mar- Ritchie in the Journal of the 

 HI/IK it Lore Society (i. 350-357), where fresh 

 examples from the Scotch Highlands and south 

 of Ireland subsequently appeared. In the same 

 .fiiiininl (ii. 204-220) the present writer showed 

 Shelta to lie a systematic perversion of the pre- 

 aspirated Gaelic spoken anterior to the llth century, 

 and Dr Kuno Meyer ( ii. 257-266) in an erudite paper 

 on 'The Irish Origin and Antiquity of Shelta' 

 adduced numerous references to this jargon in 

 early Irish MSS. Shelta has been identified by 



Pr Meyer with the ancient secret language called 

 Ogam, a word probably surviving in the name Gam 

 or Gamoeh cant. References to Ogam as a spoken 

 tongue occur in the Annals of Clonmacnoise (1328) 

 and in O'Molloy, Grammatica (1677), p. 133. 

 Several common Shelta words are found in the 

 Duil Laithne or Book of Latin (cf. 'Laidionn nan 

 ceard ; ' for Latin = cant, see Pott's Ziaemier, i. 8 ), 

 an Ogam glossary copied by MacFirbis from an 

 old or middle Irish MS. Professor Thnrneysen 

 (Revue Celtiqite, vii. 369-375) has shown that 

 many of these Ogam words are formed by substitut- 

 ing for the initial its runic name : thus manaith 

 (D. L. 137 = Shelta mitnni} is formed from Ir. 

 maith by changing M into mum, the name of the 

 letter; Shelta naaherttm, 'mother,' being similarly 

 an anagram of muinathair (Ir. mathair). Shelta 

 words are also fabricated from Irish by reversing 

 or transposing the letters of the original word (e.g. 

 gre, 'rise,' Ir. erg ; tober, 'road,' Ir. bothar), by 

 changing the initial (e.g. jSmnik, 'Sunday,' Ir. 

 domnacn), and by the prefix, suffix, or interpola- 

 tion of arbitrary letters to the Irish word or its 

 anagram (e.g. gladher, 'skin,' Ir. leathar ; thalosk, 

 'day,' Ir. latha ; srigo, 'king,' Ir. rig; laskon, 

 'salt,' Ir. salann). Analogous modes of word-dis- 

 guise are described in the Amra Cholwmchille, an 

 Irish MS. of the 12th century, and in the Uraicept 

 na n-Er/es (Primer of the Poets), each of these pro- 

 cesses having a recognised name. A few old Irish 

 words are used in Shelta without disguise, as 

 kfmya, 'priest,' Ir. cairneach, 'drnidical priest;' 

 gyitkera, 'beggar,' Ir. geocaire. Shelta borrows 

 its grammar and unimportant words from Irish or 

 English. The following translation of the Lord's 

 Prayer ('Staffara a' Dhalyon") by an old Irish 

 tinker illustrates the hybrid grammar of the Ulster 

 dialect : 



Muflsha's gather, swQrth a mftnniath, mdnni-graua kradyl 

 dhailslia's iiiuumk. Ora be grMhi 'd shedhi ladhu, as aswurth 

 in mt'inniath. Btig muilsha thalosk minfirth goshta dhurra ; 

 gretul our shako aratk muflsha getyas nldyas grcdhi ganiiath 

 muilsha. Nijesh eolk mwi-i] starch gamiath but bug muttsha 

 achim ganiiath. Dhl-ll the srtdug, thardyurath and munniath. 

 Gradhum a gradhutn. 



The tinkers believe Shelta to be an independent 

 language of Pictish origin ( The Gypsies, p. 371 ). 

 Mr MacRitchie connects this tradition with the 

 fact that Creenie (Cruithnigh) is a Connaught 

 tinker surname, and Crink ( Cruithneach ) a nick- 

 name for Irish tinkers (Groome, In Gipsy Tents, 

 p. 147). Shelta contributes largely to other Eng- 

 lish and Irish cants. See ken and gage (vb) in 

 I him MM'S Caveat (1566), cin (Shelta, Ken) in Mac- 

 Elligott's Berlagar na saer, and tobar in Rapparee 

 (Ir. rapaire) cant. 



Sli<-m:ikli;i. a town of Russian Caucasus, on 

 the Pisargat River, 63 miles \V. by N. of Baku, 

 with silk manufactures. It was known to Ptolemy 

 and the Greek geographers as Semachia, and was 

 subsequently for centuries the capital of the Tartar 

 khans of Shirvan, but was entirely destroyed by 

 Nadir Shah in 1742. Nevertheless it was soon 

 rebuilt, but was overwhelmed by an earthquake in 

 1859, and a second time in 1872. Pop. 28,545. 



Shemites. See SEMITES. 



Shenaildoah, ( 1 ) a river of Virginia, drains 

 the beautiful and fertile valley between the Blue 

 Ridge and the principal range of the Alleghanies. 

 It rises in two branches, which unite about 85 

 miles \V. of Washington, and runs north-east 170 

 miles to the Potomac, at Harper's Ferry. In the 

 war of 1861-65 this valley was the scene of numer- 

 ous battles, was successively occupied by the oppos- 

 ing armies, and finally was carried and laid waste 

 by General Sheridan (q.v.) in 1864-65. (2) A 

 borough of Pennsylvania, 138 miles by rail NW. 

 of Philadelphia. It has a very large trade in 



