Yellow Bottles for Photographic Chemicals.—The proposal of your correspondent Ceridwen to employ yellow glass bottles for preventing the decomposition of photographic solutions has been anticipated. It was suggested by me, in some lectures on Photography in November 1847, and in January of the present year, that yellow bottles might be so used, as well as for preventing the decomposition, by light, of the vegetable substances used in pharmacy, such as digitalis, ipecacuanha, cinchona, &c. For solutions of silver, however, the most effectual remedy against precipitation is the use of very pure water, procured by slow redistillation in glass vessels at a temperature much below the boiling point.
Hugh Owen.
Replies to Minor Queries.
Earth upon Earth, &c.—I think the information which has been elicited in connexion with the so-called "Unpublished Epigram by Sir W. Scott," "N. & Q.," Vol. vii., p. 498., sufficiently curious to justify an additional reference to the sentiment in question; the more so as I have to mention the name of its putative author. In Montgomery's Christian Poet, 3rd edit. p. 58., he gives, under the title of "Earth upon Earth," five verses, which it would appear are substantially the same as those published by Weaver (whose Funeral Monuments, his only publication, I have not within reach), but they exhibit considerable verbal difference in the verses corresponding with those cited in "N. & Q.," Vol. vii., p. 576. Montgomery tells us in a note that this extract, given under the name of William Billyng, along with another from a poem entitled "The Five Wounds of Christ," by the same author, were from "a manuscript on parchment of great antiquity, in possession of William Bateman, Esq.," of which a few copies had been printed at Manchester, and "accompanied by rude but exceedingly curious cuts." Now who was William Billyng? And when did he live? Montgomery says "the age of this author is well known." The death of the Archbishop of Canterbury, to whom Weaver (Fun. Mon. 1631) applies the Stratford epigraph, is temp. Edward III. Is Mr. Bateman's MS. in a hand indicating so early a date?
J. H.
Picalyly (Vol. viii., p. 8.).—In Barnaby Rich's Honestie of this Age, p. 37. of the Percy Society reprint, we find this passage:
"But he that some fortie or fifty yeares sithens should haue asked after a Pickadilly, I wonder who could haue understood him, or could haue told what a Pickadilly had beene, either fish or flesh."
Little did the writer think that in future years the name would become a "household word;" though his prophecy as to the meaning of the word has been fulfilled by the appearance of the Query in the pages of "N. & Q."
The editor of the work, Mr. Peter Cunningham, has a long note on the above passage; and I am indebted to him for the following.