I keep coming across this strange (to me) short few characters at the end of lists in a book I am reading (Origin of Species) I assume it is a way of saying ‘etcetera’
Is that right?
Yes. The ampersand symbol (&) is a stylized version of the letters “Et”, Latin for and.
Yes, and &c. (which is identical to etc.) isn’t an abreviated word, etcetera, but an abreviated phrase, et cetera, which is Latin for “and others”. So the et that is sometimes written & really means and, which is sometimes written &, which is really a way of writing et. And so on. Got it?
Yes. That’s two interesting things I’ve learned today. I didn’t know ‘&’ was a stylised ‘Et’ but now that I look at it, it does looke like an ‘E’ merged with a ‘t’ (doesn’t look like that on the keyboard though)
Thanks.
In fact the one on the keyboard looks almost nothing like the one on the screen!
&
Look at the one in the thread title. It should look more like the one on your keyboard. It’s not that different, though. Close the loop at the top and slant the crossbar down, and you’ve pretty much got it. The ampersand is quite variable amoung different typefaces. Type designers really go to town on it sometimes.
&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
I’m rather fond of the Courrier New and Frankling Gothic Italics, myself.
As an added bit of trivia, the word ampersand comes from 19th century schoolchildren being made to recite the alphabet. & came at the end following Z. The children were specifically taught that certain characters were, by themselves, whole words. When the teacher pointed to the first letter, they were taught to say “A, per se, ‘a’.” (A, by itself, is “a”.) When the teacher pointed to the ninth letter, the children were taught to say “I, per se, ‘I’.” And when the teacher pointed to the last character, the children were taught to say, “And, per se, ‘and’.” The children, of course, had no idea what this meant, and slurred the words together, and at least an entire generation grew up thinking they were being taught that the name of this symbol was ampersand. Which it now is.
I was going to nitpick this as I’d always parsed it as “and so on or and so forth”, but checked out some online sources and many of them use the phrasing: “and the others, and so of the rest”.
In my writing I commonly resort to et al. short for et alia: “and others.” The prime difference is that et cetera commonly refers to objects and list items whereas et alia refers exclusively to persons (quite often the remainder of the authors of a paper in my case).
-DF
That type of symbol, merging the e and the t in et, is called a Tironian note – from the type of shorthand found in ancient and mediaeval manuscripts, and called after Cicero’s secretary.
One of my minor fields was Latin palaeography, and I took several courses in learning to decipher the various old hands (both bookhand and notarial). There is a terrific, standard dictionary for the various symbols compiled by Capelli.
The third picture on this link
http://www.evellum.com/ductus/demo/engine/ductus/frames/terms/tironian_notes.html
is an et or ampersand from a mediaeval manuscript.
This link
http://vindolanda.csad.ox.ac.uk/tablets/TVIIcat-shand.shtml
shows you examples of the Vindolanda Letters, found near Hadrian’s Wall, and dating from the early second century. (Scroll down for the link to the samples). You can see the Vindolanda Letters on display in the British Museum, and if you toddle up to the British Library, there are quite a number of manuscripts on display.
A lovely book to see the scripts and samples of the writing from the first century AD until about the 17th is Michelle Brown’s *A Guide to Western Historical Scripts from Antiquity to 1600 *(1990) She is one of the people I studied with.
Probably more than you wanted to know, but it is one of my favourite subjects! 
Et alii means “and other people” (a male or a mixed group); et aliae means “and other people” (an exculsively female group); et alia means “and other things”. Any of them can be abbreviated et al.. Et cetera means “and the rest”. As originally construed, et cetera is neuter so it should refer only to things, not people. But many careful writers and writing authorities no longer follow that stricture.