244 PROCEEDINGS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. 
moon in some phase; literally it means “black month” and now 
denotes January. In 10, 10’, 14 kusa may stand for eguzki, the 
sun. Egubena for egunbena or eguzbena denotes the fifth day of the 
week, Thursday, in Basque, but its derivation is obscure. According 
to Festus, bwris, the tail of the plough, was an Etruscan word. It 
may appear in 2 pikoya buratu, the extremity or bending of the 
ploughshare. The Basque verb burdatu means to bend, and from it 
burdax, an extremity, is supposed to be derived. Such a term must 
be astronomical, as the whole of the contents of the Templum appear 
to be. 
With this arcane subject I close for the present my survey of the 
Etruscan inscriptions, which I have pursued with ever-increasing 
sympathy for the many and distinguished scholars who have read 
them by a totally different system, in view of the numerous apparent 
confirmations of their process, yet with ever-increasing confidence 
that by that process no light can be shed on Etruscan antiquities 
nor a solid basis be gained for a consistent reading of the documents 
themselves. Conscious of its many imperfections, I send this article 
forth from my study as a first essay in decipherment calling for the 
honest criticism and collaboration of scholars to whom truth is more 
than theory, rather than a decipherment itself of the documents with 
which it deals. Nor can J, in closing, forbear to express to one 
whose name occurs frequently in these pages, my sense of indebted- 
ness for long hours stolen from the engagements of a busy life to add 
to my Etruscan material, to read with critical eye the results pre- 
sented, and to furnish me with many valuable suggestions .which 
cannot but be useful to the student of the new process. 
ETRUSCAN VOCABULARY. 
In this vocabulary, as in the first reading of the inscriptions in the 
text, I have given the same conventional phonetic values to the 
Etruscan characters. Thus I read A as ra, O as ma, 8 as no, E as 
ne, Pas tu, de. For the extent to which this conventional reading 
may be departed from I refer to the analysis of the syllabary, without 
a careful study of which this vocabulary cannot be understood. 
A ra, Basque ra, to, towards. 
A ra, Basque ara, interjection, behold. 
A ra, Basque ere, also. 
A ra, B. erre, to burn. 
Lae Gael 
