54 PROCEEDINGS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. 
In his Lectures on The Science of Language (1st Series, Lecture 
II.), Max Miiller remarks “that it is not in the power of man 
either to produce or prevent a continuous change in language. * 
* * Language cannot be changed or moulded by the taste, the 
fancy or the genius of man. * * * lLanguage exists in man, 
and it lives in being spoken. * * * A language as long as it 
is spoken by anybody lives and has its substantive existence.” Cor- 
nish is no longer spoken. In 1860 Prince Louis Lucien Bonaparte, 
in company with the Vicar of the Parish of St. Paul, Cornwall, 
erected a monument to the memory of Dorothy Pentreath, who died 
in 1778, and who is said to have been the last person that could 
converse in Cornish. In the preface to his Glossary of Cornish 
names, Dr. Bannister remarks, on the authority of Polwhele, that 
Williard Bodenner, who died about the year 1794 at a very advanced 
age, could ‘‘converse with old Dolly,” and “talked with her for 
hours together in Cornish.” Whether Dolly Pentreath was the last 
person who spoke Cornish or not, it is admitted that about the close 
of the last century, Cornish ceased to be a spoken language. 
It is beside the purpose of this paper to examine the question, as 
to what place or places may have been included under the designa- 
tion, Cassiterides. The author of an article on Cornwall in the 
Encyclopedia Britannica affirms “that there can be no doubt that 
Cornwall and Devonshire are referred to under the general name of 
the Cassiterides or the Tin Islands.” In adverting to the Scilly Isles 
in his Celtic Britain (p. 44-47), Rhys states that “they have been 
sometimes erroneously identified with the Cassiterides of ancient 
authors. * * * There is not a scrap of evidence, linguistic or 
other, of the presence of Pheenicians in Britain at any time.” 
Warner, in his Zour Through Cornwall, which was published in 
1809, contends (p. 199) “that it is a fact irrefragably established. 
that the Phenician colonists of Gades trafficked to the south-western 
coast of Cornwall from high antiquity.” Betham, in his Gael and 
Cymbri \p. 64), asserts “that the Phenicians were called so, because 
they were a nation of sailors or mariners, as the word Phenice inti- 
mates—felne, a ploughman, and otce, water—a plougher of the sea.” 
A wide divergence of opinion thus prevails as to the relation of the 
Pheenicians to the south-west of England in the far-off centuries. 
Betham contends that the word Scillies or Sceleys is derived from 
scal, noisy, ahd wag, rocks ; and that, accordingly, the signification is. 
