346
NOTES AND QUERIES. no s. vn. MAY 4, 1007.
found it at last, viz., in No. 311, near the
beginning. It is not quite exact.
WALTER W. SKEAT.
EARTHQUAKES AND MONT PELEE. (See 10 S. v. 388, 436, 492.) I venture to correct your correspondent X. when, at 10 S. v 388, he speaks of
'" the earthquake with a simultaneous eruption oi Mont Pelee which happened on 8 May, 1902, and
destroyed St. Pierre, in the Isle of Martinique, with more than 20,000 inhabitants."
I have a vivid recollection of the events of that memorable morning, hearing, as I did, the rumblings of the detonations from Martinique, some 200 miles off, like the sound of distant artillery ; but I do not remember that there was any earthquake -apart from what may have proceeded from the eruptions of Mont Pelee itself. It was the furious blast of burning sand and poisonous gases that overwhelmed the ill- fated city, and, in a minute or two, destroyed not some 20,000 persons, as your correspond- ent states, but nearly 40,000. The ordinary population of St. Pierre was about 30,000, but the town at the time of the eruption, being en fete for some festival, had an additional 10,000 or so visitors. It has been said that no such a parallel has ever before been given to the world of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Since his note appeared your corre- spondent's list of great earthquakes must be increased by the terrible one that occurred at Kingston, in the island of Jamaica, on 14 January last, which resulted in the loss of at least 1,000 lives ; indeed, it is believed by many that that number has been very largely exceeded. J. S. UDAL, F.S.A. Antigua, W.I.
" HOGSHEAD " : ITS DERIVATION. I find an early spelling of hogshead which is not given in ' N.E.D.' : " In duobus hogsheveds vini albi." A.D. 1437, in Brand, ' Pop. Antiq.' (1849), ii. 75, note. Here the spelling heved makes it quite certain that the latter element is the mod. E. head.
WALTER W. SKEAT.
FORSYTHIA SUSPENSA. The yellow flowers of this shrub have formed in recent years such a beautiful ornament to our gardens in the early spring that it is of interest to recall the origin of the name. It is taken from William Forsyth, formerly super- intendent of the royal gardens at St. James's and Kensington, who died in 1804. In the ' D.N.B.' we are told that " the plant named Forsythia after Forsyth in Thomas Walter's 'Flora Caroliniana,' 1788, p. 153, is now
designated Decumaria." That is true, but
the writer neglects to mention that, after
it was found that Walter's Forsythia was
the same plant as that called Decumaria
by Linnaeus, Vahl (a Danish botanist, who
died the same year as Forsyth) gave the
name Forsythia to a Japanese genus (of
which the suspensa is the only species) of
the natural order Oleacese, and this is the
shrub which is now so largely cultivated
in our gardens under that name.
W. T. LYNN. Blackheath.
HUNTER'S WOOD : HUNTER'S CAKES. In the very faulty English translation of Baldaeus's ' Naauwkeurige Beschryvinge van Malabar en Choromandel. . . .En het mach- tige Eyland Ceylon,' printed in vol. iii. of Churchill's collection of voyages and travels (1703), we read on p. 652 :
" At Porto Novo inhabit some Portugueses ; their Trade consists chiefly in a certain hard Wood call'd Hunter*- Wood" &c.
Again, on p. 807 we are told of a certain province in the north of Ceylon :
" This Province affords a kind of Wood call'd Jagers- Wood (or Hunters-wood), which for its good- ness is transported to the Coast of Coromandel."
In both cases the original Dutch has Jager- hout ; and the German version, from which the English translation was made, has Jager-holtz. Of course jager here has nothing to do with Dutch jager or German Jdger, but is simply a Dutch spelling of the Portu- guese jagra, jaggery. The kitul-palm was called by the Portuguese jagreira, and this the Dutch turned into jager-boom, the timber of the tree being termed jager-hout. (There was some confusion, however, between the jaggery-palm, Caryota urens, and the palmyra, Borassus flabelliformis, both palms yielding jaggery and valuable timber. )
A similar error to the above is found in the (also very incorrect) English translation of Haafner's ' Reize te Voet door het Eiland Ceilon,' printed in vol. v. of Sir Richard Phillips's ' New Voyages and Travels ' (third series), where, on p. 64, we read :
' In conclusion he presented me with some white hunter'* cakes made of sugar of the country." There is a double error here, the original stating that the present consisted of " some white cakes of jaggery or sugar of the country " (" eenige witte jagerkoeken of suiker van het land "). Very possibly the translator in this case thought that the . cakes of jaggery were carried by hunters
