n the surface and
the bottom of the water. Accordingly, hooks are attached to a line at given
intervals throughout its length, with leaden shots, likewise regularly
distributed, in order to sink it, and keep it extended perpendicularly in
the water.

This regularity of arrangement, and the resemblance of the shots to
_beads_, seems to have caused the contrivance to have been, somewhat
fancifully, likened to a _chaplet_ or _rosary_. In a rosary there is a bead
longer than the rest, for distinction's sake called the _Pater-noster_;
from whence that name applies to a rosary; and, therefore, to anything
likened to it; and, therefore, to the article of _fishing-tackle_ in
question.

The word _pater-noster_, i.e. _pater-noster-wise_, is an heraldic term
(_vide_ Ash's _Dictionary_), applied to _beads_ disposed in the form of a
cross.

ROBERT SNOW.

_Welsh Words for Water_ (Vol. iii., p. 30.).--

"It is quite surprising," says Sharon Turner (_Trans. of the Royal
Society of Literature_, vol. i. pt. i. p. 97.), "to observe that, in
all the four quarters of the world, many nations signify this liquid by
a vocable of one or more syllables, from the letter M."

He mentions the Hebrew word for it, _mim_; in Africa he finds twenty-eight
examples, in Asia sixteen, in South America five, in North America three,
in Europe three; and elsewhere, in Canary Islands one, in New Zealand one.
He adds--

"We trace the same radical in the Welsh _more_, the sea, and in the
Latin _mare, humor, humidus._[27]

"All these people cannot be supposed to have derived their sound from
each other. It must have descended to them from some primitive source,
common to all."

From the expression used by J. W. H., "the connexion of the Welsh _dwr_
with the Greek [Greek: hudor] is remarkable," he appears not to have known
that Vezron found so many resemblances in the Doric or Laconic dialect, and
the Celtic, that he thereupon raised the theory that the Lacedaemonians and
the Celts were of the same--the Titanic--stock.

T. J.

[Footnote 27: He may have added the Armoric or Breton _mor_, _mar_; and the
Irish _muir_, _mara_.]

_Early Culture of the Imagination_ (Vol. iii., p. 38.).--The germ of the
thought alluded to by MR. GATTY is as ancient as the time of Plato, and may
be found in the _Republic_, book ii. c. 17. If this will aid MR. GATTY in
his research, it is gladly placed at his disposal by

KENNETH R. H.