Jack and Jill (nursery rhyme) and brown paper were a home cure used as a method to draw out bruises on the body. Jack is the most common name used in English-language nursery rhymes and represented an archetypal Everyman hero by the 18th century, while Jill or Gill had come to mean a young girl or a sweetheart by the end of the Middle Ages. However, the woodcut that accompanied the first recorded version of the rhyme showed two boys (not a boy and a girl) and used the spelling Gill not Jill. The true origin of the rhyme is unknown, but there are several
Appley Dapply's Nursery Rhymes in the Peter Rabbit collection. "Miss Moppet" was intended for babies and very young children, and MacDonald believes Potter's suggestion indicated she also intended "Appley Dapply" for the very young who are satisfied with vignettes and the sorts of simple, isolated incidents nursery rhymes present, rather than longer, more complex plots. MacDonald believes the illustrations are some of Potter's best, but the book suffers from its small format and would be better suited to the larger format Potter originally intended. Much detail in the illustrations, MacDonald argues, is obscured with the reduction in book size. M. Daphne Kutzer of the