"That in many parts of Scotland (the Highlands), at the birth of a child the nurse or midwife puts one end of a great stick of the ash-tree into the fire, and while it is burning receives into a spoon the sap or juice which oozes out at the other end, and administers this as the first spoonfuls of liquor to the new-born babe."—Phillip's Sylva Flora.
Why?
G. CREED.
216. Cockney.
—In John Minshieu's Ductor in Linguas, published in 1617, the origin of this word is thus explained:—
"That a citizen's son riding with his father out of London into the country, and being a novice and merely ignorant how corn and cattle increased, asked, when he heard a horse neigh, what the horse did? His father answered, the horse doth neigh. Riding further he heard a cock crow, and said, doth the cock neigh too?"
I should not have troubled you with this story had I not been anxious to ascertain the real origin of the word "Cockney," about which Johnson seems to have been nearly as much in the dark as I am. For any other and more rational explanation I shall be much obliged, as well as by being informed from what source Minshieu derived this story of a cock and a horse, which I am confident I have met with elsewhere, and which is probably familiar to many of your readers.
H. C.
Workington.