THIRTEENTH ORDINARY MEETING. 187 
indelible footprints of themselves and of their language in the names. 
which the Topography perpetuates for the information of posterity. 
Thomas Stephens, the well-known author of the Literature of the 
Kymry, avers, “that the Welsh or Kymry are the last remnant of’ 
the Kimmerioi of Homer and of the Kymry, the Cimbri of Germany.” 
It is possible to cite the authority of two learned Welshmen in favour 
of the theory that the Gaels preceded the Kymry in the occupation 
of Britain. Edward Llwyd, the famous author of the Archeologica 
Britannica, who expended five years in travelling among the por- 
tions of Great Britain and Ireland where the Celtic languages were 
spoken, and who is justly regarded as the Father of Welsh Philology, 
thus writes in his Welsh preface to his book: ‘* Nor was it only 
North Britain that thesé Gwydhelians (Gaels) inhabited in the most 
ancient times, but also England and Wales . . . Our ancestors did’ 
from time to time drive them northward ... From Kintyre, in 
Scotland, where there are but four leagues of sea, and from ‘the 
County of Galloway and the Isle of Man, they passed over into Ire- 
land, as"they have returned backwards and forwards ever since. . . 
There are none of the Irish themselves, so far as I know, . . . who. 
maintain that they had possession of England and Wales. And yet, 
whoever takes notice of a great many of the names of the rivers and 
mountains throughout the kingdom, will find no reason to doubt 
that the Irish must have been the inhabitants when those names 
were impressed upon them, 7.e., upon the rivers and mountains.” In 
his Celtic Britain, (p. 4,) Professor Rhys, of Oxford, who is himself’ 
a Welshman, and a Celtic scholar of large attainments, asserts that 
the Goidels (or Gaels), were undoubtedly the first Celts to come to 
Britain, as their geographical position to the west and north of the 
others would indicate. In connection with the Ogam Inscriptions, 
which are found in Wales, he remarks in his Celtie Britain, (p. 213,): 
that the Goidels belonged to the first Celtic invasion of Britain, and 
that some of them passed over into Ireland and made Ireland also Cel- 
tic. Some time later there arrived another Celtic people with another 
Celtic language. ‘These later invaders,” he writes, “called them- 
selves Brittons, and seized on the best portions of Britain, driving 
the Goidelic Celts before them to the west and north of the Island ;. 
and it is the language of these retreating Goidels of Britain that we 
have in the old Inscriptions and not of Goidelic invaders from Ire- 
land. Their Goidelic speech, which was driven out by the ever- 
