Here, as I expected, I found an alliterative translation of the phase in question "For they are fare as they were lunaticke, and not love-sicke."
The translation, I may add, is in prose.
Oxoniensis.
Walthamstow.
The Megatherium in the British Museum (Vol. vii., p. 590.).—It is much to be regretted that A Foreign Surgeon should not have examined the contents of the room which contains the cast of the skeleton of this animal with a little more attention, before he penned the above article. Had he done so, he would have found many of the original bones, from casts of which the restored skeleton has been constructed, in Wall Cases 9 and 10, and would not have fallen into the error of supposing that it is a fac-simile of the original skeleton at Madrid. That specimen was exhumed near Buenos Ayres in 1789; whilst our restoration
has been made from bones of another individual, many of which are, as I have stated, to be found in the British Museum itself, and others in that of the Royal College of Surgeons. I are not about to defend the propriety of putting the trunk of a palm-tree into the claws of the Megatherium, though I do not suppose that the restorer ever expected, when he did so, that any one would entertain the idea that this gigantic beast was in the habit of climbing trees; but I would fain ask your correspondent on what grounds he makes the dogmatic assertion that "Palms there were none, at that period of telluric formation." I will simply remind him of the vast numbers of fossil fruits, and other remains of palms, in the London clay of the Isle of Sheppey.
W. J. Bernhard Smith.
Temple.
Pictorial Proverbs (Vol. v., p. 559.).—Perhaps the book here mentioned is one of the old German Narrenbuchs, or Book of Fools, which were generally illustrated with pictures, of which I have a curious set in my possession.
Can any of your correspondents give some account of the nature and merits of these books? Are any of them worth translating at the present day? The one from which my pictures were taken has the title Mala Gallina, malum Ovum, and was published at Vienna and Nuremburg. It seems to have been a satire on the female sex; but the text, I am sorry to say, is not in my possession.