July 24, 1879] 



NATURE 



287 



well known in Irish legend. It means the slave or servant 

 of Nuadha, and belongs to a group of Irish proper names 

 which I take to be of a N on- Aryan origin, and to mark 

 the prse-Celtic race of Ireland. Another of the same 

 kind was Mogh Neid, the slave or servant of Ndid ; for 

 the Ancient Irish had a god of war called Ndid or Ndt. 



This kind of nomenclature, I need hardly say, is well 

 known on Semitic ground : take, for instance, the biblical 

 Abdiel, " servant of God," or the inscriptional Abdastartits, 

 "servant of Astarte." On the other hand the Aryans 

 gave the preference to compounds such as the Sanskrit 

 Deva-datta, Greek eeo'-Soror, or the Welsh Cad-wal, Irish 

 Cath-al, Old German Hatho-wulf, or the wolf of war. 

 To return to Lydney, the name Nodens, genitive Nodejitis 

 is precisely what would make in Irish, according to the 

 phonological laws of that language, a nominative Nuadha, 

 genitive Nuadhat, that is on the supposition that the first 

 syllable of the god's name was long, Nodens or Nudens; 

 further, corresponding to an Irish nominative Nuadha, 

 the Welsh form should be Nudd, with ft pronounced 

 nearly like German ii, and dd like th in the English word 

 this; and Nudd occurs in Welsh both in prose and versei 

 namely, in connection yi'\\h. Edern son 0/ Nudd axid Givyn 

 son of Nudd, where it probably meant a god-ancestor 

 rather than the father ; compare Bran son of Llyr, that 

 is, Bran son of the Sea. Even the hesitation in spelling 

 between Nodens and Nudens fits exactly into Welsh 

 phonology, which makes both the 6 and the u of the 

 language in its early period into ii in its later stages ; 

 from the Lydney inscriptions this would seem to have 

 been nearly accomplished in the first century. 



It is unfortunate that Welsh literature gives us no in- 

 formation as to the attributes of Nudd ; the case is much 

 the same with Nuadha in Irish literature, but it is right 

 to say that the latter makes Nuadha to be a king of the 

 Tuatha Dd Danann, that is to say, king of the most 

 mythical race in Irish legend, and the following passage 

 in O' Curry's Lectures on the Manners and Customs of 

 the Ancient Irish (iii. 156) is to the point, though he 

 gives no reference to the original, which he had in view 

 in it : — " The river Boyne, from the clearness of its waters, 

 was poetically called Righ Mnd Nuadhat j that is, the 

 wrist or forearm of Nuadhat's wife. This lady was one 

 of the Tuatha Di Danann j and the poetical allusion to 

 her arm originated from her keeping it constantly covered 

 with rings or bracelets of gold to bestow upon poets and 

 musicians." I am inclined to think that the term Righ 

 Mnd Nuadhat had a much deeper meaning, and that it 

 is, in fact, a relic of Irish mythology. For there is good 

 ground for believing that the Boyne was personified and 

 probably worshipped ; I conclude this from the meaning 

 of its name, which was in Old Irish Boind, genitive 

 Boindco, and in Ptolemy's Geography Bot/oviVSa, i.e., 

 Buwinda, which has been equated and, no doubt, cor. 

 rectly with the Sanskrit adjective govinda, which, accord- 

 ing to the Petersburg Dictionary, means " acquiring or 

 winning cows or herds," and occurs as an epithet to 

 Brhaspati, Krsh«a, and Vishnu. In Cormac's Glossary 

 we learn that the Boyne had another name, Berg:ia or 

 Bregna, which also appears to have been personal. In 

 Britain, the Dee, for example, was undoubtedly regarded 

 as a divine stream, and probably also Ptolemy's Belisama 

 ■wrongly identified in my Lectures on Welsh Philology 



with the Dee. If, then, the Boyne was such another 

 river divinity, nothing could be more natural than for the 

 muse of mythology, if I may use the term, to marry her 

 to Nodens, god of the sea, if it is right, as it seems to be, 

 to describe him as such. 



Mr. King touches on several minor points of great 

 interest to Celtic philologists, as, for instance, when he 

 says of Senilis, " that his uncommon cognomen is probably 

 a translation of his British name. Hen, the Old; " but it 

 is hardly necessary to speak here of a translation, as at 

 the date of the dedication heii was sen in all Celtic 

 languages, and the Welsh change of initial s into h did 

 not set in for centuries afterwards. With Senilis may be 

 compared or contrasted the Senilus of the post-Roman 

 inscription of St. Just in Cornwall, see p. 406 of the Lec- 

 tures on Welsh Philology, and also the " Grammatica 

 Celtica," p. 769, where an Irish name is mentioned as 

 written Sinill, with which may be compared the Senyllt 

 of later Welsh : more than one of these forms seem to 

 postulate a Latin Senilius. Hubner has other instances 

 of Senilis besides the one from Lydney. Quite distinct 

 from the fortune of initial s was that of Yowel-flanked s, 

 as it has disappeared without a trace both in Welsh and 

 Irish, and that probably at a very early date : possibly 

 before they had differentiated themselves into distinct 

 languages. The Lydney inscriptions seem to me to give 

 strong indirect evidence to the effect that it had in this 

 country disappeared before the first century ; for the best 

 explanation of the doubling of the s in POSSVIT and 

 PROMISSIT is to suppose the inscriber to have been a 

 Celt, in whose language, as in Welsh and Irish, a soft s or 

 single s between vowels was unknown ; his mistake could 

 be copiously paralleled by the way Welshmen of the 

 present day deal with English j and z. I suspect also 

 that the Celtic word for god, of the same origin and 

 derivation as the Latin divus and beginning, as it must 

 have in early Welsh, with the syllable dev, had not a 

 little to do with the spelling DEVO in the tablet of 

 Silulanus. 



I cannot end this somewhat lengthy notice without 

 heartily thanking Mr. King and the Bathursts for a 

 volume so full of interest and so well got up. 



John Rhys 



THE RIGHTS OF AN ANIMAL 

 The Rights of an Animal; a New Essay in Ethics. By 

 Edward Byron Nicholson, M.A., Principal Librarian 

 and Superintendent of the London Institution. (Lon- 

 don ; C. Kegan Paul and Co., 1879.) 

 THIS is a little book— too little to be satisfactory. Its 

 object is to argue that " animals have the same 

 abstract rights of life and personal liberty with man! ' 

 The ambiguity which attaches to the word "same" in 

 this opening statement of the " principle " to be proved 

 casts its shadow over all the remaining sixty pages 

 of which the essay consists. That animals have not in 

 all respects identical "rights of life and liberty with 

 man" is too obvious a truth for even Mr. Nicholson to 

 combat. He neither objects to the slaughtering of ani- 

 mals for food nor to the working of animals for purposes 

 useful to man. Yet if the rights of animals were, strictly 

 speaking, "the same" as those of man, the former act 



