accurate measurements of the remains of ancient grandeur, or to form a scale of the curiosities of modern art; not to collect medals, or to collate manuscripts-but to dive into the depths of dungeons; to plunge into the infection of hospitals; to survey the mansions of sorrow and of pain; to take the gauge and dimensions of misery, depression, and contempt; to remember the forgotten; to attend to the neglected; to visit the forsaken; and to compare and collate the distresses of all men in all countries. His plan was original; and it was as full of genius as it was of humanity. It was a voyage of discovery-a circumnavigation of charity; and already the benefit of his labour is felt more or less in every country.' And Bentham, speaking of the literary defects of Mr Howard's productions, says even more eloquently: 'My venerable friend was much better employed than in arranging words and sentences. Instead of doing what so many could do if they would, what he did for the service of mankind was what scarce any man could have done, and no man would do, but himself. In the scale of moral desert, the labours of the legislator and the writer are as far below his as earth is below heaven. His was the truly Christian choice; the lot in which is to be found the least of that which selfish nature covets, and the most of what it shrinks from. His kingdom was of a better world; he died a martyr, after living an apostle.'

The best eulogy on Howard, however, is the reformation which has been effected in the prison system since his time, and in consequence of his labours. Until his time, little or no attention had been paid to the subject of prisons or prison discipline: all doomed to incarceration were treated with uniform indifference; and every jail was an engine of vengeful inhumanity. Howard's revelations turned attention to the subject, and various regulations were instituted, which in time remedied some of the more obvious evils of the system. Yet it was left for Mrs Fry and other philanthropists of our own day to effect a thorough revision of prison management -to cause the separation and classification of individuals, to introduce work of various kinds into the jails, and to aim at the moral reform of offenders. Much still remains to be effected in all these respects; but not the less is society indebted to the early and untiring exertions of the BENEVOLENT HOWARD.

NAMES OF PERSONS.

IN the Bible, the oldest and most venerable of our books, the personages mentioned are, with few exceptions, respectively distinguished by a name consisting of but a single word; such as Abraham, David, Samuel, Matthew, and so on. Such was the ancient practice in the east in regard to the names of individuals; the term employed by parents in giving names to their children having often a reference to some passing and memorable circumstance. According to this method of naming, there were no family names. It was therefore customary, for the sake of distinguishing the family connection, to specify whose son a person was, as for example, 'Joshua the son of Nun.' The Scriptures, old and new, abound in lists of nativity of this kind.

The Greeks were not farther advanced in their system of naming than the Hebrews. They bore only one name from the beginning to the end of their political existence. It was customary to give the eldest son the name of his paternal grandfather, and other relatives were similarly complimented by giving their names to the other children. The Greeks, aided by the remarkable flexibility of their language, had a happy knack in inventing names, and thus possessed a large stock. Still the ambiguity arising from the single-name system made it necessary to have recourse to expedients for marking more unmistakably who was meant. The most common expedient was to say who a person's father was, as Socrates the (son) of Sophroniscus. This was sometimes done by what is called a patronymic, that is, a name formed from the father's name; thus, Achilles was Peleides or Peleus-son. To indicate a man's city, or nation, or his profession, served the same purpose, as Thucydides 'the Athenian,' Dionysius'the Tyrant.' In the familiar intercourse of life, they made a liberal use of nicknames.

The Romans were more ingenious. They had a very complete system of nomenclature, more perfect, in fact, than anything in modern times. Every Roman in the days of the republic had at least two, and nearly always three names (1) a forename (prænomen), (2) a name (nomen), and (3) an additional name, called cognomen. The forename belonged to the individual personally, corresponding to our Christian name; and of this class there were never more than about thirty. The middle name denoted the gens (kin) or clan to which he belonged, and was socially of great importance. Every Roman belonged to some clan, who all bore the same 'name;' thus, all the members of the Julian clan had Julius for their second name. No. 106.

I

Much of the Roman law turned on the mutual rights and obligations of those possessing the same clan-name. Names of this class end in ius or eius, and are of the nature of patronymics, like M'Donald or O'Connor, as if all the Juliuses had been descended from a common ancestor Julus. Each clan comprised a number of branches or families, and the cognomen designated to which of these families a man belonged. Thus, Caius Julius Cæsar denotes the individual Caius of the Julian clan, and of that branch or family of it called Cæsar; Marcus Tullius Cicero is another typical example.. Some Romans had a second cognomen added as an honorary distinction, as Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus (from his wars in Africa). But clan and family were not the only social and genealogical relations that the Roman nomenclature could express. If a person by adoption passed from one gens into another, he assumed the three names of his adoptive father, and added to these the name of his former gens, with the termination anus (sometimes inus); Caius Octavius being adopted by C. Julius Cæsar, became C. Julius Cæsar Octavianus. Slaves had only one name; and when a slave was manumitted, he received the forename and clan-name of his former master along with his own name as a cognomen. Cicero's slave, Tiro, became as a freedman M. Tullius Tiro. This shews what might be made of a rational and consistent nomenclature.

The Romans, however, stood alone in having an effective name system; and this is one of the many proofs we have of that genius: for political and social organisation in which that people so far transcended all the other nations of antiquity. But even among the Romans, in the earlier period of their history, one name seems to have been the rule, at least with some of the tribes that united to form the Roman people; as we see in the case of Romulus and Remus.

It

Although the Romans conquered and held sway for a time over a large part of Western Europe, including the British Islands, their example in the way of naming individuals was not followed. The Germans and Celts continued as formerly to maintain the singlename system. By the introduction of Christianity, the plan was adopted of giving a child a name at its baptism, such as John, Andrew, Mary, and so forth, by which the child on growing up came to be generally known; but this still created no family name. remained the practice, for distinction's sake, to say Andrew the son of John, or William the son of Thomas. Evidently, there was in all this a great social imperfection. Such was the inconvenience that, as in the case of the Greeks, nicknames were employed to distinguish certain individuals. Of this practice we have examples in Frederick Barbarossa, meaning 'Frederick with the red beard;' Richard Cœur de Lion, Richard the Lion-hearted ;' Malcolm Canmore, 'Malcolm with the large head.' In humble life, nicknames, or they may be called distinguishing names, were exceedingly common; such as

Walter the smith, Thomas the cooper, and so on. Old writs connected with heritable property, or with civic offices, are prolific in names of this familiar kind.

Things continued in this primitive condition till about the eleventh century of our era, in some places till a later period. The confusion became so great, that as a remedy the plan of having a family name which should descend from father to son was adopted; every one having a baptismal name besides. The reason why the family name was called the surname is not very clear. The French style it the surnom, or overname, because, as is alleged, it was originally written over the baptismal or Christian name; and our term surname may have the like origin.

It is impossible to assign any definite date to the introduction of surnames; like the abolition of serfdom and many other social changes, it took place silently, gradually, and without being noted or recorded at the time. It is only indirectly, by inference from genealogies and other incidental notices, that we can gather what progress it had made at particular epochs. The innovation seems to have been begun in France by the beginning of the eleventh century; at all events before the invasion of England in 1066, many of the Norman chiefs had taken family names from their châteaux in Normandy. These names (De Warren, De Mortimer, &c.) the adventurers brought with them into England; and with the establishment of the feudal system, the practice of taking a territorial designation there became general, families of Saxon origin styling themselves de Ford, de Ashburnham, and the like. The Anglo-Norman knights whom David I. (died 1153) and his successors gathered round them, established the same system in Scotland in the twelfth century. It spread about the same time into Germany and other parts of Europe. Of course it was only the lords of the soil who could assume names of this kind; and from this circumstance the prefix de, and the corresponding German von, continue to be coveted distinctions in France and Germany, as marks that their owners belong to, or at least are descended from the landed nobility. In England, as the Norman conquerors melted into the native population, the de was gradually dropped, and only a few relics of it remain, as de Clifford, de Ros, de Vere.

In the reign of Henry I. (1100—1135), it had already become indispensable in persons of rank to have two names; for when that monarch wished to marry his natural son Robert to Mabel, one of the heiresses of Fitz-Hamon, the lady demurred:

'It were to me a great shame

To have a lord withouten his twa name.'

The difficulty was got over by the king giving his son the surname of Fitzroy. The essential principle of a surname, however, that of descending from father to son, was not steadily adhered to for

several generations. A Norman called Alan accompanied the Conqueror into England, and got a gift of lands in Shropshire. His eldest son, William, became the ancestor of the Fitzalans, Earls of Arundel; the second son, Walter Fitzalan, passed into Scotland, in the service of David I., and acquired large possessions along with the office of Grand Steward. His son bore the name, not of Alan Fitzalan, but of Alan Fitzwalter, with the title of Steward of Scotland, and it was this title of Steward or Stewart that finally became fixed as the family name.

But while this was going on among the lords of the soil, the commonalty continued, for two or three generations, to be distinguished for the most part by names like the following, taken from records of the beginning of the fourteenth century: William at Byshope Gate, Agnes the Pr'sts sister, Thom in Thelane, Johēs le Taillour, Peter atte the Bell. After a while, however, the example set by the aristocracy, and the obvious convenience of the thing itself, produced its effect, and the second names of the middle and lower classes began to descend from father to son. Yet it took centuries to establish it as a regular practice. Hereditary surnames,' says Mr Lower, 'can scarcely be said to have been permanently settled among the lower and middle classes before the era of the Reformation. The introduction of parish registers was probably more instrumental than anything else in settling them; for if a person were entered under one surname at baptism, it is not likely that he would be married under another, and buried under a third. Exceptions to a generally established rule, however, occurred in some places. The Rev. Mark Noble affirms that it was late in the seventeenth century that many families in Yorkshire, even of the more opulent sort, took stationary names.' It is doubtful if the use of hereditary surnames is even yet fully established in some places, unless the recent more stringent laws regarding registration have brought it about.

Let us now take a survey of the sources whence surnames are derived. Their variety, and the oddness of some of them, are surprising.

The territorial names of the landed gentry have already been considered. If the commonalty had not estates and castles, they could at least call one another after their places of birth or residence. A naturalised foreigner was called after his native country; hence Alman (German), Burgoyne (Burgundian), Fleming, French or Francis, Hanway (Hainault), Ireland. The first Scott probably got his name while sojourning temporarily in England, and brought it back with him to his native land; similarly, English originated in Scotland, where it has the form Inglis.

A person coming from one county or town and settling in another, was distinguished by his birthplace: as Cornwall, Durham, Berwick, Aberdeen, Sutherland, London, Wells, Bathgate. Not only counties and cities, but obscure villages, and even manors,