95 



and could we, if we were able properly to trace them backward, 

 find them merged in a Celtic dialect which again traced backward, 

 would still widen out until it was conterminous with the length 

 and breadth of the land, and had come down from a time when 

 the Norse, the Anglo Saxon, and the Latin, with the various races 

 they represented, were in Britain equally unrepresented and 

 unknown ? 



Bearing in mind how that in remote places like Torver and 

 Borrowdale they have been handed down from generation to 

 generation, I am almost assured that they can be no mere import- 

 ation ; and I do not well see what else they can be, except a relic 

 of some dialect that has left no note or record of when it passed 

 away. 



I am confirmed in this view by a work which appeared last year, 

 written by Mr. Lucas, F.G.S., who was employed in the Geological 

 Survey of Yorkshire, and to whom, in connexion with this subject, 

 I was introduced by a gentleman who was at one time his fellow- 

 labourer, the Rev. J. Clifton Ward, formerly vicar of Rydal. 



Mr. Lucas has embodied a portion of the results of his labours 

 in an exhaustive work upon Nidderdale, where he found numerals 

 almost exactly like those we have in Lakeland, and used by the 

 farmers there very much in the same way as they were used here. 

 In that work he has reprinted for the purposes of comparison, 

 almost the whole of two papers which I read upon the subject 

 before the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian Society ; 

 and he says that he has no doubt whatever that these Nidderdale 

 numerals are the remnant of a Celtic dialect, for those that spoke 

 such a dialect in that county are hardly yet cold in their graves. 



If such a dialect existed there, it forms, I think, a strong argu- 

 ment that such a dialect existed here also, for there is a very 

 remarkable coincidence between the proper names and the dialect 

 of that portion of the Pennine chain of mountains, and the proper 

 names and dialect which we find here in Lakeland amongst the 

 Cumbrian group. 



The resemblance of the names of numbers is amongst the 

 most cogent proofs of the affinity of language, and the fust Table 



