THIRTEENTH ORDINARY MEETING. 181 
» Mr. VanderSmissen also read a paper by the kev. Dr. 
MacNish, of Cornwall, entitled :— 
THE GAELIC TOPOGRAPHY OF WALES AND THE ISLE 
OF MAN. 
In a paper which I had the pleasure of sending to the Canadian In- 
stitute during last year, I endeavoured to prove, by the examination of 
topographical names in England and Scotland and Ireland, that Celts 
who spoke Gaelic must have preceded the Cymry in the occupation of 
the British Isles. On the strength of evidence which appeared to 
me satisfactory, I came to the conclusion that “ the first powerful 
stream of immigration into Great Britain and Ireland was Gaelic ; 
that the Scottish Gaels are the representatives of those Celts who 
were the first to enter Britain and to travel northwards from the 
South of England to Scotland ; and that the remote ancestors of the 
Scottish Gaels and the Celts who were the first to people Ireland, 
were one and the same people and spoke the same language.” 
I propose in this paper to examine the Topography of the Isle of 
Man and of Wales, in the hope that corroborative evidence can thus 
be obtained in favour of the theory, that Celts who spoke Gaelic pre- 
ceded the Cymry in the occupation of Great Britain; and that the 
arrival of the Cymry must have been much later than that of the 
Gaels whose language is still discernible, after the glide of many cen- 
turies, in the names of headlands and mountains, and lochs, and bays, 
and rivers. It is reasonable to conjecture that the earliest occupants 
of Britain wended their way westward, and that a Celtic population 
settled in the Isle of Man long before the Romans invaded Britain ; 
and that from Man many Celts must have passed into Ireland and at 
different times into Scotland. The Topography of the Isle of Man ; 
the names which still survive and which a succession of foreign mas- 
ters was powerless to obliterate; the language which the Manksmen 
speak down to our own day ; and the literature which they have, 
though it is not very extensive,—combine to prove that the Isle of 
Man and its inhabitants are normally Gaelic, and that Manx is closely 
allied to Irish and especially to Scottish Gaelic. Dr. Joyce in his inter- 
esting work, Jrish Names of Places, (Vol. I, p. 163), has this refer- 
ence to Manannan Beg Mac y Leirr, who, the Manksmen aver, was 
the founder, father and legislator of their country. ‘One of the 
