362 



for the purpose of ascertaining for what object the pits had been 

 made. They claimed to have settled so far as their diggings went 

 this crux of antiquaries. The report of their work is to be found 

 in the printed but not yet published volume of the " Proceedings 

 of the Society for 1880." {Vide p. 299.) 



The second afternoon meeting, under the presidency of Eev. 

 Preb. Scarth, was held on Wednesday, January 1 2th, to hear Dr. 

 Bird read an interesting paper on the names of places in the 

 neighbourhood of Bath. He took first of all the names of the 

 three combes near the junction of which Bath stands ; he then 

 discussed the common prefixes and affixes, such as "bury," "ham" 

 and the like, and then treated the different names in detail. He 

 traced most of them to a Gallic source. 



Professor Earle agreed with him that there was a considerable 

 mixture of a Gallic element in our place names, but he should 

 rather put forward the influence of the later ethnological wave, 

 the Saxon. Gallic was, so to say, underground. The word " dun," 

 of which Dr. Bird had spoken, and which appeared in the names 

 of London, and Leyden, was undoubted Celtic, but in 

 England it became Saxon ; that is, it was naturalised into the 

 language, and our ancestors used it without being aware that they 

 were employing a foreign term, and as a Saxon word it went into 

 the greater number of the place names in which it now appears. 

 "Dun" became the common word for hill 3 we have it still in "down" 

 and in the adverb " down," which is contracted from off duna. 

 The Saxon expression for " hill and dale " was " dune and dale." 

 The Professor also discussed the words "ham" and "ley," and 

 expressed his opinion that Woolley was simply Wood-ley. He 

 should be glad of information regarding the real meaning of 

 " stoke." With regard to the fact quoted by Dr. Bird that " lake " 

 in Devon and Dorset means running water, he pointed out that 

 this was the ancient meaning of the word, and that our use of it 

 is simply an adoption of the Latin lacv^. He added that he put 

 forward many years ago the suggestion that akeman, in the word 



