oth word and garment—coat—are of curious interest, one as a philological study, the other as an evolution. A singular transfer of meaning from cot or cote, a house and shelter, to the word coat, used for a garment, is duplicated in some degree in chasuble, casule, and cassock; the words body, and bodice; and corse or corpse, and corselet and corset. The word coat, meaning a garment for men for covering the upper part of the body, has been in use for centuries; but of very changeable and confusing usage, for it also constantly meant petticoat. The garment itself was a puzzle, for many years; most bewildering of all the attire which was worn by the first colonists was the elusive, coatlike over-garment called in shipping-lists, tailors’ orders, household inventories, and other legal and domestic records a doublet, a jerkin, a jacket, a cassock, a paltock, a coat, a horseman’s coat, an upper-coat, and a buff-coat. All these garments resembled each other; all closed with a single row of buttons or points or hooks and eyes. There was not a double-breasted coat in the _Mayflower_, nor on any man in any of the colonies for many years; they hadn’t been invented. Let me attempt to define these several coatlike garments. A Plain Jerkin. A Plain Jerkin. In 1697 a jerkin was described by Randle Holme as “a kind of jacket or upper doublet, with four skirts or laps.” These laps were made by slits up from the hem to the belt-line, and varied in number, but four on each side was a usual number, or there might be a slit up the back, and one on each hip, which would afford four laps in all. Mr. Knight, in his notes on Shakespere’s use of the word, conjectures that the jerkin was generally worn over the doublet; but one guess is as good as another, and I guess it was not. I agree, however, with his surmise that the two garments were constantly confounded; in truth it is not a surmise, it is a fact. Shakespere expressed the situation when he said in _The Two Gentlemen of Verona_, “My jerkin is a doublet;” and I fancy there was slight difference in the garments, save that in the beginning the doublet was always of two thicknesses, as its name indicates; and it was wadded. As the jerkin was often minutely slashed, it could scarcely have been wadded; though it may have had a lining for special display through the slashes. A jerkin had no skirts in our modern sense of the word,—a piece set on at the waist-line,—nor could it on that account be what we term a coat, nor was it a coat, nor was it what the colonists deemed a coat. The old Dutch word is _jurkken_, and it was often thus spelt, which has led some to deem it a Dutch name and article of dress. But then it was also spelt _irkin, ircken, jorken, jorgen, erkyn_, and _ergoin_—which are not Dutch nor any other tongue. Indeed, under the name _ergoin_ I wonder that we recognize it or that it knew itself. A jerkin was often of leather like a buff-coat, but not always so.