Page:New Brunswick Magazine Issue 1.djvu/389
different and a remote origin for abat. Artemisia, that queen of Caria who flourished in the same age with Xerxes,—in the fifth century B. C.—and who immortalised herself by her great deeds, especially in building at Halicarnassus that magnificent tomb for her husband, Mausolus, which was called the Mausoleum, and which has transmitted its expressive title as a common noun to all the languages of the civilized world, also erected in Rhodes a monument, or Tropaeum, to commemorate her conquest of that island.
"When the Rhodians regained their freedom, they built round the trophy, so as to render it inaccessible, whence it was known as the—abaton."
This structure having been spoken of by Vitruvius, the eminent writer upon architecture in the time of the Roman Emperor Augustus, the Greek word passed into the Latin language as a common name for an inaccessible, or impassable, structure May not abaton, as an architectural term, have passed from Rome farther westward, and become abat in the language of France?
Here I leave abat-eau with the readers of The New Brunswick Magazine, having a modest confidence that not a few of them will agree with me that this word, the composition of which is perfectly analogous with that of several other words of the same class, is the true and proper form of the name given by the old Acadians to the structures by which they protected their valuable marshes against the inroads of the sea.
ESSEAU.
It may not be amiss to present, as an appendix to the fore-going remarks, a few observations upon the other unusual word which Diéreville introduced in his description of the dykes he found in Acadie—the word