Page 31, line 10.—Gold wedges,—"the golden wedge of Ophir." In the first edition the word Stufen was rendered steps. But it has also a technical meaning of ore in masses or strata.
Page 35, line 32.—Otto Guerike, who was born at Magdeburg in 1602, and died in 1686, invented the air-pump and the barometer. The Wetter-männchen was a little man on the top of the clock, for instance, who came out in fair weather and went in in foul; or one in a bottle with a skin cover, who rose and sunk according to the pressure of the atmosphere. (See the Bubbles of Nassau.)
Page 38, line 13.—If Gaspard was simply a Knight of the Fleece, Jean Paul would seem to have taken a liberty in decorating him. "The decoration of the Grand Master is a chain composed of alternate flints and rays of steel, with the golden fleece fastened in the middle. The Knights wear a golden fleece on a red ribbon."—Line 17. Dragons and basilisks are both amphibia in the strict sense, only the two dwelling-places of the former are air and land, and of the latter water and land. The basilisk has a membranous bag on the back of his head which can be filled with air at pleasure, and also a spinal fin along his back, which adapt him to swimming.
Page 43, line 16.—The flower on behind the stag is the hunter's name for tail.
Page 44, line 11.—-"Bed-tail" does not mean here, as an English reader might imagine, the foot-board, but the cord hanging down like a bell-rope before the nose of the sleeper, by which old or feeble persons (in Germany) used to raise themselves out of bed. In the Eighth Dog-Post-Day of Hesperus, Victor is represented as raising himself slowly by the bed-tassel out of bed, which he usually left with a spring. One would think it would need mechanical aid to hoist the fevered frame from under a German feather-bed.
Page 47, line 25.—The piping of Schoppe was simply with his windpipe; the whistle one is said to wet when he drinks.
Page 48, line 14.—"Dissolving" is not quite strong enough. The idea is, that, as ships have their bolts drawn out by the lodestone and fall apart, so the senses fall apart as man sinks to slumber.
Page 52, line 24.—After-Stimme means, strictly, mock-voice.
Page 59, line 10.—"Cellini's History"; i. e. probably Goethe's translation of Benvenuto's Autobiography.
Page 60, line 18.—"Dog-Post-Day" is the title of the chapters of Hesperus, a former work of Jean Paul's, which he pretends to have composed on an island in some Indian Ocean, the materials being brought to him by a dog who swam over from the mainland with the basket containing them in his teeth; and the days of the dog's arriving with fresh material were called Dog-Post-Days.