Coal Brandy.—People now old can recollect that, when young, they heard people then old talk of "coal-brandy." What was this? Cold? or, in modern phase, raw, neat, or genuine?
CANTAB.
Swot.—I have often heard military men talk of swot, meaning thereby mathematics; and persons eminent in that science are termed "good swots." As I never heard the word except amongst the military, but there almost universally in "free and easy," conversation, I am led to think it a cant term. At any rate, I shall be glad to be informed of its origin,—if it be not lost in the mists of soldierly antiquity.
CANTAB.
REPLIES.
THE DODO.
Mr. Strickland has justly observed that this subject "belongs rather to human history than to pure zoology." Though I have not seen Mr. Strickland's book, I venture to offer him a few suggestions, not as answers to his questions, but as slight aids towards the resolution of some of them.
Qu. 1. There can be no doubt about the discovery of Mauritius and Bourbon by the Portuguese; and if not by a Mascarhenas, that the islands were first so named in honour of some member of that illustrious family, many of whom make a conspicuous figure in the Decads of the Portuguese Livy. I expected to have found some notice of the discovery in the very curious little volume of Antonio Galvaõ, printed in 1563, under the following title:—Tratado dos Descobrimentos Antigos, e Modernos feitos até a Era de 1550; but I merely find a vague notice of several nameless islands—"alguma Ilheta sem gente: onde diz que tomaraõ agoa e lenha"—and that, in 1517, Jorge Mascarenhas was despatched by sea to the coast of China. This is the more provoking, as, in general, Galvaõ is very circumstantial about the discoveries of his countrymen.
Qu. 5. The article in Ree's Cyclopædia is a pretty specimen of the manner in which such things are sometimes concocted, as the following extracts will show:—