JANUARY 9 



King Richard. Saw'st thou the melancholy Lord Northumber- 

 land? 



Ratcli/. Thomas, the Earl of Surrey, and himself, 

 Much about cockshut time, from troop to troop 

 Went through the army, cheering up the soldiers. 



Richard III., Act v. Scene 3. 



The original spelling was 'cockshoot,' as Middleton, in 

 his Widow, Act iii. Scene 1, speaks of ' a fine cockshoot 

 evening.' Needless to say that the etymology sometimes 

 suggested, as being from the time when cocks and other 

 poultry are shut up, is preposterous. ' Cockshoots ' were 

 glades in woodland, also called ' cockroads,' in which nets 

 were set of old to catch the woodcocks as they winged 

 their flight to nocturnal feeding -grounds. The term 

 'cockshoot' has fallen out of use, just as the nets for 

 catching the birds are never spread now. It would hardly 

 pay anybody to do so. 



IV 



There is a common, but probably a mistaken, belief that 

 animated nature was framed generally upon a past and 

 more gigantic scale in former geological ages FO^"^ 

 than at the present time. Certainly the Deino- Life 

 saurs of the Jurassic beds were creatures of prodigious 

 bulk, the Atlantosaurus of Colorado reaching a length 

 of about one hundred feet, with a height of thirty feet ; 

 and the recently reconstructed Diplodoccus was far longer 

 than any living animal (pace the sea serpent), and was 

 the most enormous four-footed animal that ever stepped. 

 Yet I fancy that the blue whale (Balcenoptera Sibbaldii) 

 might weigh in a winner against all creatures, past or 

 present, in the matter of sheer bulk. Moreover, while 

 the remains of large animals are more likely to be 



