98 PROCEEDINGS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. 



occurs veiy often in Eti-uria, but also in Latium ; at Tusculum we 

 have tlie Porcii Licinii, and at Lanuvium the Murenae Licinii. The 

 form Lecne, and also the feminine Lecnesa, ai'e very often met with 

 on the Etruscan monuments. Licinius is simply the latinizing of 

 Lecne, and has nothing whatever to do with licium, and still less 

 with the Basque Zunft. But in this inscription occurs the word, or 

 rather terminal, nal. No form occurs so frequently in these inscrip- 

 tions as this. In the bilinguala it is invariably rendered by the 

 Latin natus or filius. Now, the uniformity of this rendering evi- 

 dently occasioned some difficulty to Prof. Campbell, and his object is 

 to work in some word which will preserve this signification ; accord- 

 ing to his syllabarum, " nal " reads " karasa," and he says this repre- 

 sents the Basque " sortze ". Now, as Prof. Campbell evidently 

 attributes much importance to these words, and seems to regard 

 " karasa " and " sortze" as test words, going far to show the connec- 

 tion between Etruscan and Basque, and as his reasoning here presents 

 a very good example of his reasoning in general, at the risk of being 

 a little tedious, we shall examine it, and shall give his own words. 

 He says, "The Rev. Isaac Taylor and other Etruscologists, while 

 failing to translate these inscriptions, have made some good guesses. 

 Such ai'e their suppositions that the characters they have read isa 

 denote a wife, those read sec a daughter, those read al a child. The 

 first is read nare or anre, a wife ; the second, nechi or nesca ; and 

 the third, karasa ; in modern Basqvie, sortze, natus." Surely Prof. 

 Campbell must be aware that modern Basque can have no bearing on 

 the present question ; he might as well try to prove the affinity of 

 the Japanese with the old Gauls by means of the present French. 

 However, he proceeds at some length to justify the relation of the.se 

 two words karasa and sortze. He says, " It has been objected that 

 karasa and sortze are difficult to reconcile ; that nal karasa means 

 natus, several bilinguals attest." Prof Campbell's consistency is 

 very wonderful. "The Basque 'natus' is sortze. The only diffi- 

 culty in the words is the replacement of ka by so, after an interval of 

 over one thousand years in the history of the language." We must 

 plead inability to under.stand 'Prof. Campbell, but so far as we can 

 make out, he means that one thousand years ago the so of sortze was 

 ka; and that within the last thousand years it has undergone a 

 change, and kartze has become sortze. What proof can Prof Camjj- 

 bell adduce of this 1 How does he know that a thousand years ago 



