210 



NOTES ANt) QUERIES. 



[Sept. 15. 1855. 



which seems to support the latter hypothesis, and 

 then suggest how the truth of it may be ascer- 

 tained. 



There can be little doubt that a considerable 

 portion of the earliest inhabitants of Britain came 

 from Spain. Arguing from certain physical pecu- 

 liarities, Tacitus derives the Silures from thence ; 

 and this is not only supported by the number of 

 Iberic words occurring as names of places in the 

 country inhabited by those people (South Wales), 

 but by the very name of the Scilly islands — 

 Silura — showing that they had originally been 

 peopled by the same nation. Now, as the Scillies 

 are on the direct road to Spain, what can be more 

 probable than that the Silures, sailing from Spain 

 to Britain, left some of their number behind on 

 those islands ? In a work recently published (A 

 Londoners Walk to the Land's End, and a Trip to 

 Scilly Isles) the following passage occurs : 



" Some of the stones [in the Scillies] are furrowed with 

 what appear to be deeply-graven and mysterious Kunes." 



I have little doubt that these inscriptions are 

 Ogham inscriptions, and that they are the work of 

 the Iberian colonists settled in the Scillies. 



Now, if the inscriptions mentioned in the pas- 

 sage which I have quoted were examined, and 

 they proved to be in the Ogham charadters, it 

 would go far to prove that those characters were 

 originally used by the Iberians. Farther, in Spain 

 itself inscriptions have been discovered, but the 

 southern antiquaries have not yet been able to 

 decipher them. (See Niebuhr's Lectures on Anc. 

 Ethn. and Geog.) If they were examined and 

 proved to be also in the Ogham character, not 

 only would the origin of that mode of writing be 

 discovered, but the story of the Iberian settle- 

 ments in Ireland, and of the Iberian origin of the 

 Silures, would be shown to rest on an historical 

 basis. E. West. 



VERB AND NOMINATIVE CASK. 



(Vol. xii., pp. 65. 153.) 



. W. B. C. does not seem to me to understand 

 the drift of W. M. T.'s remarks. I conceive the 

 latter to be putting in a plea for certain excep- 

 tions to a rule of grammar, against the jurists, 

 who are unwilling to allow such exceptions. It is 

 sufficient for the justification of these exceptional 

 phrases, that they are received as idioms, and 

 therefore not to be tried by ordinary laws of syn- 

 tax. Their history is another matter. 



It is not, as I understand it, W. M. T. on his 

 schoolmaster's authority, but only the school- 

 master, who condemns the expression " A man 

 six foot high." I am inclined to join with the 

 schoolmaster, though not from the reason that I 

 do not believe (as W. B. C. does) that this phrase 

 could have '•' originally stood," in the elegant form 



No. 307.] 



of " A man, six measures of a man's foot each in 

 length, high ;" but simply because I do not think 

 that this expression has ever received the sanction 

 of that respectable usage " quern penes arbitrium 

 est." 



That the expressions which W. M. T. quotes 

 are all more or less elliptical, there is no doubt, 

 but surely W. B. C.'s ellipses are a little too 

 recherche. Does W. B. C. really believe that the 

 folks who now say " three and eleven pence half- 

 penny is not a high price for good Irish cloth," 

 were, at some remote period, in the habit of saying 

 " the sum of three shillings and eleven pence and 

 a halfpenny is not a high price to give," or to ask 

 for (a certain quantity of) good Irish cloth ? or 

 is this merely a useful grammatical fiction, like 

 the " original contract" between king and people, 

 which you may talk about without believing that 

 it was ever actually signed, sealed, or delivered ? 

 When I say " ninety-tive is a great age," I quite 

 agree with W. B. C. that the words " ninety-five " 

 alone mean nothing ; but there is logically no- 

 omission, save of the substantive, which must be- 

 long to the adjectives ninety-five. Yet the verb 

 is used in the singular ; and the original reason 

 for this was, not that the expression was once 

 thrice as long, but that the idea in the mind is of 

 a total. But I am not at liberty to use a singular 

 verb in any case where any nominative, being 

 plural, is resolvable into a total. I cannot, for 

 instance, say " ninety-five soldiers is arrived," 

 and excuse myself by saying that I meant " a 

 company consisting of ninety-five soldiers is ar- 

 rived ; " and that I considered the word soldiers 

 in the " abbreviated sentence to be used in the 

 genitive case." I have heard people, when sur- 

 prised at an accusation exclaim, "Me?" and have 

 been at a loss to imagine why they gave the pre- 

 ference to the accusative pronoun on the occasion. 

 But W. B. C.'s theory of ellipses furnishes an ex- 

 planation in a moment. The part suppressed in 

 the sentence, as it originally stood, is " are you 

 alluding to — ?" Here you have at once a pre- 

 position properly governing an accusative. There 

 is, in fact, scarcely any violation of the rules of 

 syntax which may not be justified in some way by 

 the supposition of an ellipse. It is, therefore, not 

 because the expressions referred to may be capable 

 of rational explanation, but because they are re- 

 ceived idioms, that I am allowed to employ them. 



T. E. M. 



I remember hearing or reading an assertion 

 which, though it may be too much of a gene- 

 ralisation, seems to have many instances to rest 

 upon. It is that the genius of our language re- 

 serves the plural for indefinitely many, and ex- 

 presses definitely many by the singular. This 

 really seems to be almost a rule in composition of 



