Notes 



Page 161. the elephant is said to be two years in his dam's belly. The period of 

 gestation is twenty months. B. 



Page 162. a person of honour , etc. In the margin of fifth edition "Mr. Fr. 

 Ru." conjectured by Nicolas to have been Francis Rufford, of Sapy, in Worcester- 

 shire, who died about 1678, aged eighty-two. 



Page 164. The age of carps. The carp's tenacity of life is very great ; in 

 Holland they sometimes suspend them in a damp cellar in nets full of moss, which 

 are moistened with milk, and the fish not only live but grow fat. All writers 

 agree in attributing to them great longevity, even to a hundred and fifty or two 

 hundred years, though, as Vaniere says, they become white with age. B. 



Page 170. this Cjesner affirms. Dr. Bethune says that similar stories are often 

 told in America which we may well believe. 



Page 170. the French esteem this fish highly. The bream seems formerly to 

 have been a favourite dish in England. Sir William Dugdale has preserved a 

 curious instance of the great price, at least in the interior parts of the kingdom, 

 which it bore as long ago as the 7th year of Henry V., when it was rated at 20^. 

 And he informs us that in the 32nd Henry VI., 1454, "A pye of four of them, in 

 the expences of two men employed for three days in taking them, in baking them, 

 in flour, in spices, and conveying it from Button in Warwickshire to the Earl of 

 Warwick at Mydlam in the North Country, cost xvj/. \']d." Antiquities of 

 Warwickshire, p. 668. N. 



Nicolas also quotes the following pretty lines from Skelton : 



In the middes a cundite, that curiously -was cast 

 With fyfes of golde, engushyng out streames 

 Of cr 1st all, the clerenes these "waters far past 

 Enrwmmyng "with roches, barb Us, and breames 

 Whose s kales ens lured again the son beames 

 Englist red : that joyous it ivas to beholde 

 Than farthermore about me my sight I reuolde. 



Page 176. From St. Jameses-tide until Bartholomew-tide. From July 25 to 

 August 24. 



Page 177. The Tench, the physician of fishes. That the tench possesses healing 

 properties is a widely held belief, for which one of Walton's editors, Mr. Christo- 

 pher Davies, seems to think there may be some slight basis of fact. " The skin of 

 a freshly caught tench from clear waters," he says, " always seems to me to have a 

 peculiarly cool, soft, and pleasant feel. It has been ascertained by experiment that 

 pike will not feed upon tench." 



Sir Harris Nicolas quotes Lord Burleigh's papers to this effect : " The perche 



418 



