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with the noun abois, which means the condition of a hunted animal brought to bay. None of these attempts, however, have been entirely successful. One correspondent of this Magazine, Mr. George Johnson, favors the easy,—too easy—deduction of the word from aboi and d'eau. And another contributor, M. Raoul Renault, pointedly exposes the weakness of this explanation.

There is less reason to support the far-fetched and fanciful notion, which Dr. S. E. Dawson entertains, that aboiteau is the correct form of the word, and that it is derived from an obsolete Norman French verb bot—a branch of a tree. In the islands of Guernsey and Jersey, it is said, a billet of wood, or a branch of a tree, fastened to a horse's foot, or leg, to prevent him from leaping over fences, is called abot, and that to clog, or hopple, an animal in that manner is expressed by aboter. From this tact, or because the dykes described by Diéreville are built with untrimmed trees as their framework, the conclusion is reached that aboiteau is the word used by the Acadians, and that its signification is a water-clog. For myself, I am strongly inclined to doubt the existence of bot as a merely Breton word. It is the old French form of the modern French bout, meaning an end, extremity, piece, part, and not a tree or a branch of a tree. The aboteau of Diéreville is, moreover, something more than a mere water-clog, whatever that may be; and neither the assumed Breton root bot nor the abot found in patois of the Channel Islands furnishes a solid basis for it I have not within my reach George Metioier's Dictionaire Franco-Normand, else I might have more to say in reference to these words. If, however, in that patois the clog attached to a breachy horse's leg is called abot, is it not highly probable that the word is simply the equivalent of the ordinary French botte, the Spanish and Portu-