270 



♦ KNOWLEDGE ♦ 



[July 1, 1886. 



' KnnJ,' says Mr. Freeman, is ' quite beyond me.' Well ! I 

 got the form Kiiud from Mr. Freeman himself In his 

 ' Old English History,' edition of 1878, p. 222 (a little book 

 expressly written for children), I read as follows: — ' Cnut 

 or Knud Ls liis real name. He is often called Ganutus or 

 Canute. ... It is better to call him by his own name.' 

 Airain, in the ' Nnrm.an Conquest,' vol. i. p. ■442 (edition of 

 18G7), I find as follows: — ' Cnut or Knud, in one syllable, 

 is this king's true name.' Having these passages under my 

 eye, I wrote : — ' Cnut or Kinid . . . had rather a queer 

 look.' I did not say that Mr. Freeman constantly used 

 Knud. He tells children it is better to call the king by his 

 own name, and that Cnut or Knud, is his real name. And 

 now he says Knud is quite beyond him ; and that it would 

 indeed look odd to talk about Kniid. So I said." 



" Then about Edward the Elder. Mr. Freeman reproves 

 me for saying that Edward called himself Rex Anglo- 

 Saxonum ; that it ought to be Re.x Angul-Saxonuiii. It so 

 happens, that to be quite safe, I had before me, when I was 

 writing this sentence, that admirable little book, ' Old 

 English History,' by E. A. Freeman, p. 139 (edition of 

 1878), where I read that, ' He [i.e. Edward] commonly calls 

 himself Rix Awjlo-Saxonum' (sic). I simply copied out 

 those words, as I was dealing with ]Mr. Freeman about a 

 popular mode of speech. I was quite aware that the spell- 

 ing of the Charters is Bex Angul-Saxonum, because, in 

 writinst, I had under mv eye as well Mr. tireen's ' Conquest 

 of England,' pp. 192, l'03, and P.i.shop Stubbs's 'History,' 

 vol. i. p. 17:^, both of which so spell the title. But since 

 the matter in hand was the nvmna Anglo- Sa.ron itself, not the 

 spelling of the name, I was satisfied to follow Mr. Freeman's 

 Re.r Anglo-Saxonuin." 



" Then, says Mr. Freeman to me, whence do I get my Karl, 

 and where for twenty years past has he himself said any- 

 thirjg about Kai-l ? I did not assert that Mr. Freeman 

 usually writes of Charlemagne as Karl. On the contrary, I 

 wrote — ' Professor Freeman taught us to speak of Charles 

 the Great.' When, later on. I wrote — ' we h.ave all learned 

 to speak by the card of Karl,' I had in my mind and under 

 my eye a very famous essay, where I read the name Karl 

 six times in twenty lines of print, .all .about the ' Legend of 

 Charlemagne,' and the ' Hi.story of Karl.' My edition of 

 this essay bears the date 1872. I cannot undertake to re- 

 member all the editions of all Mr. Freeman's books, or when 

 he first dropped Karl. But having written that ' Professor 

 Freeman taught us to speak of Charles the Great,' I felt 

 amply justified by this essay in adding in a merry vein, ' we 

 liave all learned to speak by the card of Karl.' Professor 

 Freeman's lessons are not so soon forgotten as he thinks." 



This is as amusing as anything we have heard of in this 

 line. But Mr. Harrison can see the serious aspect of the 

 offence he thus ridicules. We commend to the very careful 

 r.ttention of our readers the remarks with which he draws 

 his reply towards its close : — 



" Names and words are current coin of the realm, which, 

 for public convenience, have definite values ; and to clip and 

 deface them is to debase the linguistic currsncy. It is the 

 part of a good citizen and a sensible man to carry on his 

 transactions in the current coin, taking them and counting 

 them at their official value. If a man, in order to make his 

 words answer to facts, and not to raise any ' false ideas,' 

 were to c it a five-shilling piece in two, and to offer the bits 

 as two half crown.s, the public would call him crazy, and the 

 police would treat him as ' a smasher.' Mr. Freeman is 

 i-eally trying to pass amongst the lieges Saxon seeats and 

 scillings, as if they were good current coin. The first 

 magistrate before ^^hom he is brought will tell him that 

 seeats and scillings are not now in circulation, and that 

 jirivate persons have not the light of coining. 



" Of course in this matter of spelling there are very real 

 and important points behind. It is a serious evil to unsettle 

 the language. It is unkind to throw fresh stumbling blocks 

 in the way of education. All singularity in forms, without 

 motive or without adequate motive, is a fresh difliculty and 

 a source of ofience. If we tried to torture all names in 

 history out of their current forms and into their contempo- 

 rary orthography, if we tried with the modern alphabet to 

 represent the various sounds of a liundred diflerent languages, 

 to spell the same name in a dozen different forms, according 

 to the century of which we are speaking, this would produce 

 a literary chaos. And since there is no adequate i-eason for 

 specially selecting any one epoch or any one race for this 

 equivocal distinction, it is the pai-t of good sense and good 

 English to be content with the current names long fiimiliar 

 to us in the best literature. The.se names, no doubt, do 

 differ moderately, and from time to time, as language grows, 

 changes in form are spontaneously adopted. But the claim 

 of any scholar, however eminent, of .any knot of scholars, to 

 sweep the lioard of the familiar names for one particular 

 epoch, and systematically to force on us and on our children 

 another language in names — this is a bad claim, and ought 

 to be resisted." 



Extend what is here said chiefly of historical literature 

 to literature generally, including the literatiu'e of art and 

 science, and we have the true gospel in regard to the 

 development of language. Techni«dities have no more 

 place in literatui'e than medals have in current coinage. 



COAL. 



By W. M.\ttieu Williams. 



THE SOURCES OF TERRESTRI.\L CARBON. 



fe ^^Mi i j ^feSap HE onrjraving on p. 271 supplies an interest- 

 ing illustration of the mo.st characteristic of 

 the coal-measure rocks. It is an engraving 

 on wood, from a pliotograph of a piece I 

 picked u]i on the spoil bank of a pit- 

 sinking at Leeswood, in Flintshire. The 

 extreme length of the specimen (measured 

 on the face that is here represented) is Gj inches, and its 

 thickness not quite 2J; inches. It is the " Linstay " or 

 " Linsey " rock I have already described, and it displays 

 about thirty miniature seams of coal, with inteilayers of 

 sandstone. They do not come out so distinctly in the 

 photograph as in the original on account of the shadows 

 due to overhang ; the middle dark band is made up of 

 more than a dozen alternations. 



This .specimen also presents a natural diagram in miniature 

 of what .so commonly occurs on a large scale in most coal 

 beds — very vexatiously and frequently so in Flintshire. 

 This is a fiuilt. The working goes on smoothly enough 

 along one of the seams indicated by the dark lines until it 

 reaches the vertical dark Hue, which is a sort of cr.ack run- 

 ning down through the strata. On cmssiug this the coal 

 disappears, and the miner has to learn whether the fault is 

 an upthrow or a downthrow, which he does by examination 

 of the strata which is pi-esenteJ to him instead of coal. He 

 knows by the i-ecord of strata (.always carefully ke[(t) 

 through which he passed in sinking the pit what is above 

 him, and if he comes upon a downthrow he may at once 

 recognise his position, anil estimate the me.isure of down- 

 throw and consequent depth he has to sink in order to reach 

 the coal again. 



In the opposite case, when he meets an upthrow — i.e. 

 when he has been working in a downthrow — he mayor may 



