166 SOME OBSERVATIONS ON THE 



One lias often noticed in old wood cuts, and in most pictui-es drawn 

 by children, an attempt to exhibit two opposite sides of an object, 

 without regard for the perspective. Now one way of doing this — 

 one sometimes sees it done intentionally in drawings of machinery — 

 is to raise the outer side above the other. As I take it, in the few 

 instances in which we find a second tier of oars, the artist, kno^ving 

 that a spectator would see the oars only of the rowers nearest to 

 him, the rowers themselves being partly hidden by the bulwarks, 

 while the rowers on the other side, being further from the inter- 

 vening bulwarks, would be more conspicuous, wished to bring their 

 oars also into view. No doubt this error in the perspective, once 

 introduced by the original artist, would be carried still further by 

 the copyist, who possibly never saw such a vessel in his life ; and 

 this too would explain some of the strange comments which are to 

 be found in later writers. With regard to the supraposition of the 

 rowers, I cannot but think that, especially in very large vessels, 

 where each oar was manned by ten or sixteen rowers, it would be 

 necessary for the men at the upper extremity of the oar to be placed 

 higher than those nearer to the thole pin; otherwise they would 

 hardly have been able to reach the end of the oar when it was dipped 

 in the water. As the upper part of the oar would necessarily 

 describe a greater curve than the lower, it would be natural that 

 the pay of the Thranite should be higher than that of the Thalamite. 

 In the case of Ptolemy's ship, it is probable that the rowers relieved 

 one another, and did not all row at the same time. When I had 

 arrived at the above conclusion, it occurred to me that the term 

 daXa^ii-rtjq admitted of a very significant derivation (it is ordinarily 

 supposed to be connected with ddkafio':, i.e. " the man who sits in 

 the hold"). The aperture through which the oar projected was 

 called ^ daXafita scil. otztj ; and, as I take it, both these words are 

 derived from axaX/xd^, "the thole pin" to which the oar was fastened ; 

 (TxaXfiui; naturally passes into ffxaXap.o';. On calculating the probabili- 

 ties in favour of this derivation, I came across one or two other words 

 for which it seemed to me moi'e natui'al to assume a parallel phonetic 

 change, than to assign them to the roots to which they are ordinarily 

 referred : e.g., Ocutztid is suggestive of ax(t)-~u), OdTr-io of axd-ru) (cp. 

 rdtppoq). Accordingly 6 QaXaixirrjq would be the rower who sat nearest 

 to the thole pin. As I thought that the probabilities were in favour 

 of this view, I ventured to communicate it to the Admiral, who had 



