SOME POPULAR FALLACIES.

Press, Volume LX, Issue 18230, 14 November 1924, Page 11

SOME POPULAR FALLACIES.

Popular fallacies constitute a branch of knowledge which should not be paraded.' AVhen somebody (for instance) refers to Columbus's discovery) of North America, it is well to . refrain | from pointing out that John Cabcfc is the true claimant to that honour. Cabot discovered Newfoundland in 1497. The first; land cf the New World discovered by Columbus was one of the Bahama Islands ; then came Cuba and Haiti (which he called Hispanola); and it was. on his third great voyage, in 1498, that he Kit the mainland—not of North, but of South America. . The wise man may know all this. He may-hold the beiifer tiiat tne Vikings (whose name has. nothing to do with kmg, ■by the" by, but means creek dwellers"), crossed the Atlantic long before' any other Europeans. But he will only get himself hated as a prig it he insists on dethroning Columbus. Tradition is stronger than history. Alfred probably never burnt the cakes. But 'does it matter ? The! Colossus or Rhodes was not planted at the entrance to' the harbour, it was not a striding statue, and ships never passed beneath it. . But the conception, is fine. Julius Caesar was not an. Emperor of Rome. He was a general, a consul and a dictator, but never-"Emperor." Cleopatra, was nqt Egyptian, but the last of the'Ptolemys, who were a Greek dynasty in Egypt. Othello was. riot a black Moor; for'two reasons, (1) that Moors are not black, and he was a Venetian, and therefore not a Moor at all. Picgenes did not live in a tub. Seneca, three hundred years later, merely happened to say that -"a man so crabbed ought to have lived in a tub like a dog." ' " . St. Augustine' did " not introduce Christianity into England. St. Alban had suffered martyrdom on account of thp Christian faith' more than two centuries before St. Ausustine landed. Dick Turpiir did not ride from T/Ondon to York in twenty hours. This feat was performed by another highwayman ; and in any case Black Bess-, the horse, was; an invention, cf Harrison Ainsworth.

"Spare the rod and spoil the child," "Pouring oil on troubled ■waters," '' God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb," and "In the midst ,of life we are in death," are commonly alluded to as Biblical, but nowhere in the Bible do they occur. The phrase, "To sleep the sleep of the just, "' is another trap for the unwary; and, indeed, no one seems to know who coined it, unless we are to,accept the explanation that it originated (in French, of course) in a passage of Racine's "Port Royal" which makes the more mysterious its universal popularity in colloquial English.

The animal and vegetable worlds are rich, in possibilities, of easy but. mistaken assumptions. . Why call Jerusalem artichokes by that name if they do not come, and never did cnme, from Jerusalem? The misunderstanding is due to our incorrigible habit of mispronouncing foreign languages, for the name is a corruption of the Italian girasole (stf&flower), of which the Jerusalem artichoke is a species. Jordan almonds, similarly,. have nothing to .do with the River Jordan. Their name is merely another awful "bloomer" in the way of anglicising from a strange tongue. "Jordan" originated in the French jardin, garden, and indicated the.cultivated almond as opposed to the small fruit of the wild almond. French beans are not French. They come from South America. Rosewood

is not the wood of the rose tree. ' Its name is due to the faint smell of roses in certain Brazilian timber when first cut. The tuberose has, nothing to do either with tubes or roses; its botanical name is Polyanthus tuberosa, and this has caused the misconception.

But, not being a nation of philologists, we shall go On blundering about various elementary facts in natural science just as we blunder about notorious episodes and characters in history. That succulent bird, the turkey, for example, wa3 not originally imported into Britain from Turkey. To London and, Bristol the, turkeys were brought by traders. who, dealt chiefly with the Near East, ajid hence were called Turkey merchants, but actually, the birds had come from India. (Their name on French menus is dinde and dindon; Le., poule d'lnde.) Even so, the turkey seems to have been introduced into South-west India by the Portuguese. It-is really a native of America.