a wine used by our ancestors, which some have taken to be Rhenish and some Canary wine.—Venner, in his Via Recta ad Vitam Longum, printed in 1628, says that sack is "completely not in the third degree, and that some affect to drink sack with sugar and some without; and upon no other ground, as I think, but as it is best pleasing to their palate." He goes on to say, "that sack, taken by itself, is very hot and very penetrative; being taken with sugar, the heat is both somewhat allayed, and the penetrative quality thereof also retarded." He adds farther, that Rhenish, &c., decline after a twelvemonth, but sack and the other stronger wines are best when they are two or three years old. It appears to be highly probable that sack was not a sweet wine, from its being taken with sugar, and that it did not receive its name from having a faccharine flavour, but from its being originally stored in fasks or barochios. It does not appear to have been a French wine, but a strong wine the production of a hot climate. Probably it was what is called dry mountain, or some Spanish wine of that kind. This conjecture is the more plausible, as Howell, in his French and English Dictionary, printed in the year 1650, translates sack by the words vin d'Espagne, vin sec.

Sack of Wool, a quantity of wool containing just 22 stones, and every stone 14 pounds. In Scotland, a sack is 24 stones, each stone containing 16 pounds.

Sack of Cotton Wool, a quantity from one hundred and a half to four hundred weight.

Sacks of Earth, in Fortification, are canvas bags filled with earth. They are used in making retrenchments in haste, to place on parapets, or the head of the breaches, &c., to repair them, when beaten down.