392 



nasium, or pleasantest exercise in smallest space." The 

 memory of this fact is preserved in a song of the Gre- 

 cian women, called the song of the mill, which began, 

 " Grind mill, grind ! even Pittacus, king of Mitylene, doth 

 grind !" 



In illustration of the use of the quern at an early period, 

 Mr. Smith cited a notice of it from an ancient Irish poem, 

 (extracted from the Memoir of Londonderry accompanying 

 the Ordnance Survey,) by Cuain O'Lochain, who died, ac- 

 cording to the Annals of Tighernach, in 1024: also an inte- 

 resting Scandinavian legendary ballad, called the Quern song. 

 That Shakspeare was acquainted with it, appears from the 

 allusion in his " Midsummer Night's Dream," where he 

 speaks of the fairy Puck as labouring in the quern. 



Mr. Smith then briefly noticed a few of the many pas- 

 sages in Scripture referring to the hand-mill, some of which 

 show it to have been common to the Egyptians and Philis- 

 tines as well as the Jews. As to its use in modern times in 

 Cyprus, Palestine, Hindostan, and generally throughout 

 the East, he read passages from Shaw's and Clarke's 

 Travels, and from the Journal of Mrs. Farrar, the wife of a 

 missionary at Nassuck near Bombay. He also noticed an en- 

 graving in Davis's China, representing a man working a larger 

 mill by means of a sort of handspike which he pushes back- 

 wards. 



Mr. Smith then read an extract from Pennant's Tour to 

 the Hebrides, referring to the enactment in the reign of 

 Alexander III. of Scotland, (A.D., 1284,; prohibiting the 

 use of the quern except during stress of weather, or in 

 other cases of necessity : notwithstanding which, Pennant 

 still found it there in 1772. 



In Sir Walter Scott's visit to the Orkneys in 1814, he saw 

 the quern in the house of an old woman who, practising 

 the trade of a witch, subsisted by " selling winds" to the sea- 

 men of the neighbouring coast. And in the Shetland islands 



