a sentence in the collections from Hakluyt down to Burney to indicate that when the early sailors pushed at handspikes or dragged upon the rigging they animated their labours with songs and choruses. I have some acquaintance with the volumes of Shelvocke, Funnell, and other marine writers of the last century, but though many of them, such as Ringrose, Dumpier, Cooke, Snelgrave, and particularly Woodes Rogers, enter very closely into the details of the shipboard work of their time, they are to a man silent on this question of singing. It is for this reason that I would attribute the origin of the practice to the Americans. // // If most of the forecastle melodies still current at sea be not the composition of Yankees, the words, at all events, are sufficiently tinctured by American sentiment to render my conjecture plausible. The titles of many of these working songs have a strong flavour of Boston and New York about them. 'Across the Western Ocean'; 'The Plains of Mexico'; 'Run, let the Bulljine, run !' 'Bound to the Rio Grande '; these and many more which I cannot immediately recollect betray to my mind a transatlantic inspiration. 'Heave to the Girls'; 'Cheerly, Men'; 'A dandy ship and a dandy crew'; 'Tally hi ho! You know'; ' Hurrah! hurrah! my hearty bullies'; and scores more of a like kind, all of them working songs never to be heard off the decks of a ship, are racy in air and words of the