Nemo.
[That Papissa Joanna is merely a fictitious character, is now universally acknowledged by the best authorities. "Clearer confirmations must be drawn for the history of Pope Joan, who succeeded Leo IV. and preceded Benedict III., than many we yet discover, and he wants not grounds that doubts it." So thought Sir Thomas Browne, in his Vulgar Errors, B. vii. Ch. 17. Gibbon, too, rejects it as fabulous. "Till the Reformation," he says, "the tale was repeated and believed without offence, and Joan's female statue long occupied her place among the Popes in the Cathedral of Sienna. She has been annihilated by two learned Protestants, Blondel and Bayle; but their brethren were scandalized by this equitable and generous criticism. Spanheim and L'Enfant attempted to save this poor engine of controversy, and even Mosheim condescends to cherish some doubt and suspicion."—The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chap. xlix. Spanheim's work, Joanna Papissa Restituta, was printed at Leyden in 1692.]
The Well o' the World's End.—I am very anxious to find out, whether there still exists in print (or if it is known to any one now alive) an old Scotch fairy tale called "The Weary Well at the World's End?" Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, Esq., who is unhappily dead lately, knew the story and meant to write it down; but he became too infirm to do so, and though many very old people in the hilly districts of Lammermoor and Roxburghshire remember parts of it, and knew it in their youth, I cannot find one who knows it entirely.
L. M. M. R.
[Some references to the story alluded to by our correspondent will be found in Dr. Leyden's valuable introduction to The Complaynt of Scotland; and the story itself in Chambers's admirable collection of Scottish Folk Lore, Popular Rhymes of Scotland, p. 236. of the third edition, which form vol. vii. of the Select Writings of Robert Chambers.]
Sides and Angles.—What is the most simple and least complicated method of determining the various relations of the sides and angles of the acute and obtuse-angled triangles, without the aid of trigonometry, construction, or, in fact, by any method except arithmetic?
F. G. F.
St. Andrew's.
[The relations of sides and angles cannot be obtained without trigonometry in some shape. A very easy work has lately been published by Mr. Hemming, in which there is as little as possible of technical trigonometry.]
Meaning of Ratche.—In John Frith's Antithesis, published in 1529, he says: