and in French ‘mandragora’ ‘main de gloire’{271}. {Sidenote: ‘_Necromancy_’} ‘Necromancy’ is another word which, if not now, yet for a long period was erroneously spelt, and indeed assumed a different shape, under the influence of an erroneous derivation; which, curiously enough, even now that it has been dismissed, has left behind it the marks of its presence, in our common phrase, “the _Black_ Art”. I need hardly remind you that ‘necromancy’ is a Greek word, which signifies, according to its proper meaning, a prophesying by aid of the dead, or that it rests on the presumed power of raising up by potent spells the dead, and compelling them to give answers about things to come. We all know that it was supposed possible to exercise such power; we have a very awful example of it in the story of the witch of Endor, and a very horrid one in Lucan{272}. But the Latin medieval writers, whose Greek was either little or none, spelt the word, ‘nigromantia’, as if its first syllables had been Latin: at the same time, not wholly forgetting the original meaning, but in fact getting round to it though by a wrong process, they understood the dead by these ‘nigri’, or blacks, whom they had brought into the word{273}. Down to a rather late period we find the forms, ‘_negro_mancer’ and ‘_negro_mancy’ frequent in English. {Sidenote: _Words Misspelt_} ‘Pleurisy’ used often to be spelt, (I do not think it is so now,) without an ‘e’ in the first syllable, evidently on the tacit assumption that it was from _plus pluris_{274}. When Shakespeare falls into an error, he “makes the offence gracious”; yet, I think, he would scarcely have written, “For goodness growing to a _plurisy_ Dies of his own _too much_”, but that _he_ too derived ‘plurisy’ from _pluris_. This, even with the “small Latin and less Greek”, which Ben Jonson allows him, he scarcely would have done, had the word presented itself in that form, which by right of its descent from πλευρά (being a pain, stitch, or sickness _in the side_) it ought to have possessed. Those who for ‘crucible’ wrote ‘chrysoble’ (Jeremy Taylor does so) must evidently have done this under the assumption that the Greek for _gold_, and not the Latin for _cross_, lay at the foundation of this word. ‘Anthymn’ instead of ‘anthem’ (Barrow so spells the word), rests plainly on a wrong etymology, even as this spelling clearly betrays what that wrong etymology is. ‘Rhyme’ with a ‘y’ is a modern misspelling; and would never have been but for the undue influence which the Greek ‘rhythm’ has exercised upon it. Spenser and his cotemporaries spell it ‘rime’. ‘Abominable’ was by some etymologists of the seventeenth century spelt ‘abhominable’, as though it were that which departed from the human (ab homine) into the bestial or devilish.