WRITER TO THE SIGNET, abbreviated W.S., ie the designation of the members of that class of attorneys or procurators who enjoy, in common with the solicitors of supreme courts, and with one or two smaller bodies, the privilege of conducting cases before the Court of Session, the Court of Justiciary, and the Commission of Tcinds. Their peculiar privilege, however, is that of preparing the writs which pass the royal signet. The signet was a seal or die under the control of the secretary of state, with which the writs by which the king directed parties to appear in court, or ordered them to obey the decrees given against them, and other executive instructions, were stamped for the sake of authentication. lu the 16th century, the persons who were entitled to present the writs which received the impression of the signet aro supposed to have been the clerks in the secretary of state's office ; and it is not known how or precisely at what time the persons who transacted this department of official business became converted into a body of private practitioners. Since the Union of 17u7, the signet has been under the disposal of the Court of Session ; but down to about the middle of last century the keeper of the signet was deputed by the secretary of state for the home department. Since that time he has been appointed under the great seal, and he names a deputy, who is a member of the society of writers to the signet, and by usage pre sides at their meetings. In the general,case the summons by which an ordinary action is brought into the Court of Session requires to be signeted, and to be, as a preliminary, signed by a writer to the signet ; although a member of one of the other privileged bodies may couduct the case. Advocation [AnvocaTiosi], and some other analogous classes of procedure, required formerly to have the interposition of the signet; but this step iu the procedure has been abolished. The writers to the signet now possess few privileges which are not shared by the other practitioners before the supreme courts. They still retain their privi leges as to summonses, and they have the exclusive right of presenting signatures in exchequer, or of presentiug, through the judges acting in exchequer, the indorsed drafts of the writs passing uuder the great and other seals in Scotland appended to crown charters, appointments to offices. &c. They have thus a monopoly of the business of making up the titles of the crown vassals in Scotland. The society require of their intrants an apprenticeship of five years, with a curriculum of university study, which includes two sessions of attendance, the one at Latin and the other at some other literary class, and four courses of attendance at law classes. The writers to the signet possess a library, the collect ing of which commenced in 1755, by the purchase of some law books, to which works on other subjects were added in 1776. It is now sup. ported ly an annual grant by the society.
an Englishman is the representative of what might as well be denoted by the two consonants k s. But in the Greek alphabet it was merely a guttural aspirate, equivalent probably to the German c h. The cause of this change in the power of the symbol appears to admit of the following explanation :—Before the employment by the Greeks of their character F. or E, it was their common custom to represent this sound by X 1. as may be seen in Boeckh's inscriptions, rather than by it 1, of which there exist however a few examples, as in the so-called Vanian Inscription. [Aarnamsr, plates ii. and id.] Now the Romans copied this Greek practice, and we consequently find in Latin inscrip tions such forms as MAISTMVS, PROXSVMVS, &e. See the Index of
Marini's ' Fratelli Arvali.' So again coins give us the proper name axszvs, where the later orthography would have been axles; and even existing manuscripts still bear traces of this orthography. Thus the Medicean MS. of Virgil has EXSESA (` Aen.', viii. 418), Exsvrr (' Aen.', viii. 557). But the Romans, being generally averse to the aspirated letters (h itself, though written, seems not to have been pro nounced by them), had little or no occasion for the character x except in this combination with an s. The very sight therefore of an x, even before the eye came to the s, raised in the mind the idea of a sibilant, and thus rendered the sibilant itself a superfluous letter ; which, because it was superfluous, would before long be omitted, and thus the single letter x would perform the office of the two consonants x s. It may be objected to this view, that in one of the oldest inscriptions, the Bacchanalian (see the plate in the seventh volume of Drakenborch's Livy), we have the form EIDEICEDENT, where the letter in question already has the power of our modern x. This perhaps is an erroneous idea. It would probably bo more correct to look upon the character in this word as the simple guttural. thus : cehdeicerent, from which the later form cdicercnt would easily flow. A sibilant in this word would have given tho same offence to a Roman, as elarSovar would have done to a Greek ear. It should be recollected too that the old Latin prepo sition had the form e c, as seen in mfari, eefcrre, &c. (for thus did Cicero write these words), and that a sibilant was added only before the sounds p, k, I, or before a vowel. An argument against the view we have taken in reference to the change of power in the symbol might be founded upon the fact that the Spaniards employ the very same Nymbel as a guttural. Thus in the geographical names Xeres, Xalapa, Mexico. the x has little or nothing of a sibilant character.
The letter x was the last iu the Roman alphabet, neither v nor z belonging to it, although the majority of Latin grammars include them. On reflection however it will be admitted that the words in which those two letters occur are not really part of the Latin language, but borrowed from the Greek, as zephyrus, :mat ; or from some Eastern source, as gars. Such forms as lachryma, hyena, sylra, are simply errors of modern editors. The Romans themselves wroto lacruma or Motio!, hicme, or rather hiempe, and aura. But the fact that x was the final letter of the Roman alphabet is established by an anecdote in the Life of Augustus by Suetonius (c.88).
The interchanges of x with other lettere are as follows : 1. x with c, as in the double form, already mentioned, of the Latin or Greek preposition ex or cc.
2. x with a c or sk. See S.
3. x with g, as in the Latin augeo compared with the Greek avtave and Ary-nis compared with mix, Eng., and mix-ine, Latin.
4. x with pa, as the Latin cxilis compared with the Greek ilsaor. In the same way we find an illiterate Roman officer writing ixi for ;psi, and thus too proximus is the superlative of prope. This change is in fact only another instance of the interchange of p and c, so common between Greek and Latin. See C.
5. x perhaps with h. Thus toes is probably in the first syllable the equivalent of the Latin /testis and hove*. See 0 and N. So again hada is probably connected with the Greek t VITUS.
6. x with z. Thus in Spanish a r is found where the Latin has an x. For example, the Latin words crux, pax, have become in Spanish paz, whence the names of the American towns, Vera Cruz and La Paz.