which represents him as one of the crew of Hon.
Company's ship "Degrave," whose wreck upon Madagascar I take to be an
undoubted fact? What so probable as this recognition, in a small provision
for a man in his old age, whose misfortunes commenced while in their
service? Finally, to me the whole narrative of Robert Drury seems so
probable, and so well vouched for, that I have given in my adhesion thereto
by removing him to a _higher shelf_ in my library than that occupied by
such apocryphal persons as Crusoe, Quarle, Boyle, Falconer, and a host of
the like.

J. O.

[Footnote 1: The editions of _Madagascar_ known to me are those of 1727,
1731, and 1743, by the original publisher, Meadows, Hull, 1807, and London,
1826.]

* * * * *

THE TERMINATION -BY.

(Vol. vii., p. 536.)

I would suggest a doubt, whether the suffix _-by_, in the names of places,
affords us any satisfactory evidence, _per se_, of their exclusively Danish
origin. This termination is of no unfrequent occurrence in districts, both
in this country and elsewhere, to which the Danes, _properly so called_,
were either utter strangers, or wherein they at no time established any
permanent footing. The truth is, there seems to be a fallacy in this Danish
theory, in so far as it rests upon the testimony of language; for, upon
investigation, we generally find that the word or phrase adduced in its
support was one recognised, not in any single territory alone, but
throughout the whole of Scandinavia, whose different tribes, amid some
trifling variations of dialect, which can now be scarcely ascertained, were
all of them as readily intelligible to one another as are, at this day, the
inhabitants of two adjoining English counties. If this were so, it appears
that, in the case before us, nothing can be proved from the existence of
the expression, beyond the fact of its _Norse_ origin; and our reasonable
and natural course is, if we would arrive at its true signification, to
refer at once to the parent tongue of the Scandinavian nations, spoken in
common, and during a long-continued period, amid the snows of distant
Iceland, on the mountains of Norway, the plains of Denmark, and in the
forests of Sweden.

This ancient and widely-diffused language was the Icelandic, Norman, or
Doensk tunga,--that in which were written the Eddas and Skalda, the {106}
Njala and Heimskringla. In it we have the suffix _by_, under the forms of
the verbs