Transactions was curiously changed in an advertisement, and the Calamites, a species of fossil plants of the coal measures, with but slight change appeared as ``The True Fructification of Calamities.’’ This is a blunder pretty sure to be made, and within a few days of writing this, the author has seen a referp 117ence to ``Notes on some Pennsylvanian Calamities.’’ As an instance of less excusable ignorance, we shall often find the word gauge printed as guage.

One of the slightest of misprints was the cause of an odd query in the second series of Notes and Queries, which, by the way, has never yet been answered.  In John Hall’s Hor Vaciv (1646) there is this passage, alluding to the table game called tick-tack.  The author wrote:  ``Tick tack sets a man’s intentions on their guard.  Errors in this and war can be but once amended’’; but the printer joined the two words ``and war’’ into one, and this puzzled the correspondent of the Notes and Queries (v. 272).  He asked:  ``Who can quote another passage from any author containing this word?  I have hunted after it in many dictionaries without avail.  It means, I suppose, antagonism or contest, and resembles in form many Anglo-Saxon words which never found their way into English proper.’’ The blunder was not discovered, and another correspondent wrote:  ``The word andwar would surely modernise into hand-p 118war_.  Is not andirons (handirons) a parallel word of the same genus?’ In the General Index we find ``Andwar, an old English word.’’ So much for the long life of a very small blunder.

A very similar blunder to this of ``andwar’’ occurs in Select Remains of the learned John Ray with his Life by the late William Derham, which was published in 1760 with a dedication to the Earl of Macclesfield, President of the Royal Society, signed by George Scott.  In Derham’s Life of Ray a list of books read by Ray in 1667 is printed from a letter to Dr. Lister, and one of these is printed ``The Business about great Rakes.’’ Mr. Scott must have been puzzled with this title; but he was evidently a man not to be daunted by a difficulty, for he added a note to this effect:  ``They are now come into general use among the farmers, and are called drag rakes.’’ Who would suspect after this that the title is merely a misprint, and that the pamphlet refers to the proceedings of Valentine Greatrakes, the famous stroker, who claimed equal power p 119with the kings and queens of England in curing the king’s evil?  This blunder will be found uncorrected in Dr. Lankester’s Memorials of John Ray, published by the Ray Society in 1846, and does not seem to have been suspected until the Rev. Richard Hooper called attention to it a short time ago in Notes and Queries.[11]

     [11] Seventh Series, iv. 225.

An amusing instance of the invention of a new word was afforded when the printer produced the words ``a noticeable fact in thisms’’ instead of ``this MS.’’