The word emblem, ἐμβλημα, is one that has strayed very widely from its first meaning, and yet by a sort of natural process, as the apple grows out of the crab, its signification now is akin to what it was in distant ages. It then denoted the thing, whether implement or ornament, placed in, or thrown on, and so joined to, some other thing. Thus a word of cognate origin, _Epiblēs_, in the _Iliad_, bk. xxiv. l. 453,[4] denoted the bolt of fir that held fast the door;—it was something put against the door,—the peg or bar that kept it from opening. So in the _Odyssey_, bk. ii. l. 37,[5] the sceptre, the emblem of command, was the baton which the herald Peisēnor _placed in_ the hand of the son of Ulysses; and again in the _Iliad_, bk. xiii. l. 319, 20,[6] the flaming torch was the implement which the son of Kronos might _throw on_ the swift ships. Of the changes through which a word may pass, “the word Emblem presents one of the most remarkable instances.” They cannot be better given than in the “_Sketch of that branch of Literature called_ BOOKS OF EMBLEMS,” read in 1848 before the Literary and Philosophical Society of Liverpool, by the late Joseph Brooks Yates, Esq. He says of the word EMBLEM, pp. 8, 9,—“its present signification, ‘Type or allusive representation,’ is of comparatively modern use, while its original meaning is become obsolete. Among the Greeks an Emblem (εμβλημα), derived from ενβαλλειν, meant something thrown in or inserted after the fashion of what we now call Marquetry and Mosaic work, or in the form of a detached ornament to be affixed to a pillar, a tablet, or a vase, and put off or on, as there might be occasion. Pliny, in his _Natural History_,” bk. xxxiii. c. 12, “mentions an artist called Pytheus, who executed works of this last description in silver, one of which, intended to be attached to a jar (in phialæ emblemate), represented Ulysses and Diomed carrying off the Palladium.[7] It weighed two ounces, and sold for 10,000 sesterces = 80_l_. 14_s_. 7_d_. of our money. According to one ancient manuscript of Pliny, it sold for double that amount. Marcus Curtius leaping into the gulph forms the subject of a beautiful silver Emblem, in the possession of the writer.[8] When the arts of Greece were transplanted into Italy and Sicily, the word _Emblema_ became naturalised in the Latin tongue, though not without some resistance on the part of the reigning prince Tiberius. That emperor is reported by Suetonius,” _Tiber. Cæsar Vita_, c. 71, “to have found fault with the introduction of the word into a Decree of the Senate, as being of foreign growth. Cicero, however, had used it in his orations against Verres, where he accuses that rapacious governor (amongst other crimes) of having compelled the people of Haluntium to bring to him their vases, from which he carefully abstracted the valuable Emblems and inserted them upon his own golden vessels. Quintilian,” lib. 2, cap. 4, “soon after this period, in