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lation to designate and describe particular points of land, and that 

 these have grown up in different combinations to our modern stock 

 of local names. Even names which seem to bear the most manifest 

 evidence of Saxon origin were by him supposed (except in some 

 rai-e cases) to be these primitive syllables with additions. He 

 extended this theory to the written literal characters, and used to 

 say that S was a winding and hissing stream, both in the form of 

 the character and the sound to be represented. Though somewhat 

 similar schemes have been attempted by Dr. Murray and oth.ers, 

 still his system of language, liice his topographical system, was 

 quite an original conception of his owu, whether on the large scale 

 on which he proposed to explain the whole of the British topo- 

 graphical nomenclature, or in the smaller local matters with which 

 we, for the present time, more usiially connect his name. Although 

 a notice of this theory, prepared by himself, may be found in 

 Mr. Warner's Glastonbury, Mr. Skinner confidently proposed to 

 publish at large upon it, and for the publication of his manuscript 

 " Analysis of the Original Names of Places, with a Reference to a 

 Primitive Language" he left £1000 by will, which fact brings me to 

 explain that he had derived very considerable property from 

 members of the Manningham family with whom he was connected 

 by marriage. As a sample of his enthusiastic way of talking, it 

 may be mentioned that Mr. Skinner used to say that the mounds 

 and hollows on Hampton Down were the finest remains of a British 

 settlement he ever saw. Artificial work is here clearly traceable, 

 and in the blackened earth rude pottery occurs, but no skeletons nor 

 metaUic remains have been, so far as I know, found. Mr. Skinner, 

 however, could never see difficulties, and said the circles had been 

 rifled long ago. In 1830 Mr. Hunter read at this Institution 

 a paper of Mr. Skinner's " On the Early History of Bath," which 

 proved to be an attempt to show that the name of Bath is not 

 given to the place in respect of its being a place for bathing, but 

 that the name Badun existed as the name of this fortified hill on 

 Hampton Down, the JDunum of the Water Passage, as he analyses 

 it, and that this became in the mouths of the Saxons, Bathun. 

 The subject of the paper was allowed to expand into a summary of 

 the earlier Roman affairs in the South of England, or rather in the 



