o some respect, but
they certainly looked upon two very different sides of the question.
Gilchrist's conjecture that he was an ecclesiastic is quite untenable,
and I am fully inclined to agree with Sir Walter Scott, that Rowlands'
company was not of the most _select_ order, and that he must often have
frequented those "haunts of dissipation" which he so well describes in
those works which are the _known_ production of his muse.

EDWARD F. RIMBAULT.

* * * * *

"APRICOT," "PEACH," AND "NECTARINE," ETYMOLOGY OF.

There is something curious in the etymology of the words "apricot,"
"peach," and "nectarine," and in their equivalents in several languages,
which may amuse your readers.

The apricot is an Armenian or Persian fruit, and was known to the Romans
later than the peach. It is spoken of by Pliny and by Martial.

Plin. N.H., lib. xv. c. 12.:

"Post autumnum maturescunt Persica, aestate _praecocia_, intra xxx annos
reperta."

Martial, lib. xiii. Epig. 46.:

"Vilia maternis fueramus _praecoqua_ ramis,
Nunc in adaptivis Persica care sumus."

Its only name was given from its ripening earlier than the peach.

The words used in Galen for the same fruit (evidently Graecised Latin), are
[Greek: prokokkia] and [Greek: prekokkia]. Elsewhere he says of this fruit,
[Greek: tautes ekleleiphthai to palaion onoma]. Dioscorides, with a nearer
approach to the Latin, calls apricots [Greek: praikokia.]

From _praecox_, though not immediately, _apricot_ seems to be derived.

Johnson, unable to account for the initial _a_, derives it from _apricus_.
The American lexicographer Webster gives, strangely enough _albus coccus_
as its derivation.

The progress of the word from west to east, and then from east to
south-west, and from thence northwards, and its various changes in that
progress, are rather strange.

One would have supposed that the Arabs, living near the region of which the
fruit was a native, might have either had a name of their own for it, or at
least have borrowed one from Armenia. But they apparently adopted a slight
variation of the Latin, [Greek: to palaion onoma], as Galen says, [Greek:
exeleleipto].

The Arabs called it [Arabic: brqwq] or, with the article, [Arabic:
albrqwq].

The Spaniards must have had the fruit in Martial's time, but they do not
take the name immediately from the Latin, but through the Arabic, and call
it _albaric