ONE or two of the signs to be dealt with under this heading are purely heraldic; others are allied to nature, and have, as far I am aware, no connection with heraldry. The stone carving of an ape seated on its haunches and eating an apple belonged to this class; it had on it the initials B M with date 1670, and some years ago was to be seen built into a wall on the west side of Philip Lane, exactly opposite the Ward School of Cripplegate Within. The space at the back was occupied by a court, the whole being now swallowed up in the premises of Messrs. Rylands and Sons. This marked the site of an ancient galleried inn of which it had been the sign. A similar piece of sculpture is or was lately in a street called the Sporrengasse at Basle. A little further east in Philip Lane a modern sculptured cock commemorates Cock Court, now destroyed, where another ancient inn had once stood. Drawings of both are preserved in the British Museum. Not far from Philip Lane, at 17a, Addle Street, there is a fine bas-relief of a bear with collar and chain; it is above the first-floor window of a house rebuilt about twelve years ago, and has on it the initials N T E and date 1670--not 1610, as we are told by Archer. Munday and Dyson, in the fourth edition of Stow’s ‘Survey’ (1633), assert that Addle Street derived its name from Athlestane or Adlestane, whose house was supposed to have been hard by, in Wood Street, with a door into Addle Street. An interesting sculptured sign of a Bear was dug up in 1882, when the house numbered 47, on the south side of Cheapside, was being rebuilt. It was found in a damaged state 7 or 8 feet below the surface, and is now let into the wall inside the shop of Messrs. Cow and Co., india-rubber manufacturers. An old arched cellar or undercroft of considerable height still exists in the basement, and extends to a distance of some 30 feet below the street. This sign, which represents a bear chained and muzzled,[26] and in heraldic language _contourné_, or facing to the right instead of the left, has neither date nor initials. A suggestion has been made that this is the White Bear, the sign of Robert Hicks, a mercer at Soper’s Lane end, and father of Sir Baptist Hicks, born there in 1551, who built Hicks Hall[27] and who, says Strype, was one of the first citizens that after knighthood kept their shops (eventually he became Lord Campden). This, however, is by no means probable; the sign resembles others put up after the Great Fire; moreover, Soper’s Lane, now Queen Street, is some distance east of St. Mary-le-Bow Church, while No. 47 is to the west, near Bread Street. On the opposite side of the way was a house with a similar sign, as appears from the following advertisement in the _London Gazette_ of October 5, 1693: