Transactions. 27 



The river Nlth which runs by our doors may not bo 

 omitted, the word Nith means noble. 1 happened to say so 

 one day to a gentleman (a member of this Society) whom I 

 met on the banks of the river, the tide was in, and the river 

 looked beautiful. " This," said I, "is a fine river, it well de- 

 serves its name just now, for Nith means noble." " O ! no," 

 said he, " it was called the Nid formerly, Chalmers says that 

 it got the name of nid from a Scandinavian word which 

 means crooked, and that, in fact, there are several rivers in 

 Denmark that are called Nid, and they are all crooked, and 

 this river is crooked, and the name is suitable." 



This, of course, would be overwhelming only for the trif- 

 ling fact that there is no river in the whole world that is not 

 crooked, and another trifling fact is this, that this language, 

 whether it be JNid or Nith, is, or was, my mother tongue, and 

 that Chalmers knew nothing at all about it — he, like many 

 other eminent men, had to depend in such cases upon what 

 had been told him by literate or illiterate natives, and we 

 shall see presently, as in the case of our own Lochmaben, 

 (and other places which I could name,) how much " natives" 

 are to be depended on in these matters. 



Nith, then, means noble, it is a noble river now, as com- 

 pared with other rivers in the neighbourhood, and no doubt 

 it was a far nobler river theia, when it was not confined to its 

 present channel by artificial means as it is now, but, the 

 term " crooked" would not be applied to it, nor to any other 

 river whatever, by those ancient people, for the term " crook- 

 ed" could be predicated of OAiy river, and of every river, and 

 those people took care always to have both sense and mean- 

 ing in the names which they gave to things, — at all events, 

 Nith means noble, and Nid is merely the genitive of Neid, 

 a nest. 



Lochmaben may be taken as another instance of those 

 curious guesses with which we are favoured some times in 

 the endeavour to explain the original meaning of the names 

 of places, &c. 



You are aware that an excellent history of Lochmaben 



