for a peal of thunder that would make
Earth, sea, and air, and heaven, and Cato tremble."

Bacon also hath it:--

"Woods of oranges will smell into the sea perhaps twenty miles; but
what is that, since a peal of ordnance will do as much, which
moveth in a small compass?"

It is once used by Shakespeare, _Macbeth_:--

"Ere to black Hecate's summons
The shard-borne beetle, with drowsy hums,
Hath rung night's yawning peal, there shall be done
A deed of dreadful note."

Will not ringing a peal, then, mean a succession of sweet sounds caused
by the ringing of bells in certain keys? Some ringers begin with D flat;
others, again, contend they should begin in C sharp.

In your last number is a query about _Scarborough Warning_. Grose, in
his _Provincial Glossary_, give the meaning as "a word and a blow, and
the blow first;" it is a common proverb in Yorkshire. He gives the same
account of its origin as does Ray, extracted from Fuller, and gives no
notion that any other can be attached to it.

R.J.S.

* * * * *

QUERIES.

CATACOMBS AND BONE-HOUSES.

I should be very glad to have some distinct information on the above
subject, especially in explanation of any repositories of human bones in
England? Was the ancient preservation of these skeleton remains always
connected with embalming the body?--or drying it, after the manner
described by Captain Smythe, R.N., to be still practised in
Sicily?--and, in cases in which dry bones only were preserved, by what
process was the flesh removed from them? for, as Addison says, in
reference to the catacombs at Naples, "they must have been full of
stench, _if_ the dead bodies that lay in them were left to rot in open
niches." The catacombs at Paris seem to have been furnished with bones
from the emptyings of the metropolitan churchyards. In some soils,
however, the bones rot almost as soon as the flesh decays from them.

There are, possibly, many bone-houses in England. I have seen two of
considerable extent, one at Ripon Minster, the other at Rothwell Church,
in Northamptonshire; and at both places skulls and thigh bones were
piled up, in mural recesses, with as much regularity as bottles in the
bins of a wine-cellar. At Rothwell there was (twenty years ago) a great
number of these relics. The sexton spoke of there being 10,000 skulls,
but this, no doubt, was an exaggeration; and he gave, as the local
tradition, that