Sei'Te.muer 20, 1 900] 



NA TURE 



5'7 



sixth century of our era, and commemorating persons traced back 

 to a family group of the kind, perhaps, which Caesar mentions 

 in the fourteenth chapter of his fifth book. Within these groups 

 the wives were, according to him, in common (inttrse communes). 

 Take for instance an inscription from the barony of Corcaguiny 

 in Kerry, which commemorates a man described as " Mac Erce, 

 son oi Mtico Dowinias,'^ where Miico Dowinias means the clan 

 or family group of Dcrwinis or Dubin (genitive Duibne), the 

 ancestress after whom Corcaguiny is called Corco-Duibne in 

 Medieval Irish. We have the same formula in the rest of 

 Ireland including Ulster, where as yet very few Ogams have 

 been found at all. It occurs in South Wales and in Devonshire, 

 and also on the Ogam stone found at Silchester, in Hampshire. 

 The same kind of family group is evidenced also by an inscrip- 

 tion at St. Ninian's, in Galloway ; and, to go further back — 

 perhaps a good deal further back — we come to the bronze dis- 

 covered not long ago at Colchester, and dating from the time of 

 the Emperor Alexander Severus, who reigned from 222 to 235. 

 This is a votive tablet to a god Mars Medocius, by a Caledonian 

 Pict, who gives his name as Lossio Veda, and describes himself 

 further as Nepos Vepogeni Caledo. He alludes to no father, and 

 Nepos Vepogeni is probably to be rendered Vepogen's sister's 

 son. At any rate, the Irish word corresponding etymologically 

 to the Latin nepos has that sense in Irish ; but so far as I know 

 it has never been found meaning a nephew in the sense of 

 brother's son. That may serve as an instance how the ideas of 

 another race penetrated the fabric of Goidelic society ; for here 

 we must suppose a time to have come when there was no longer 

 any occasion for a word meaning a brother's son, which, of 

 course, there never was in the non-Celtic society which ranked 

 men and women according to their birth alone. 



Now this Caledonian Pict was not exceptional among his 

 kinsmen, for they succeeded in observing a good deal of silence 

 concerning their fathers down, one may say, to the twelfth 

 century. It is historical that the king of the northern Picts was 

 not wont to be the son of the previous king. In short, when 

 the Celtic elements there proved strong enough to ensure that 

 the son of a previous king should succeed, a split usually took 

 place, the purer Picts being led by the rule of succession by 

 birth to set up a king of their own. The fact is not so well 

 known that the same succession prevailed also some time or 

 other at Tara in Ireland : it is proved by a singular piece of in- 

 iirect evidence, the existence of a tragic story to explain why 

 • no son should ever take the lordship of Tara after his father, 

 unless some one came between them." The last clause is due, 

 I should say, to somebody who could not understand such a 

 prohibition based on the ancient rule that a man's heir was his 

 sister's son. This would be, according to Irish legend, in the 

 lifetime of Conor mac Nessa. 



It is curious to notice how the stories about the Pictish 

 menage seemed to have puzzled ancient authors. I will 

 only cite one instance, to wit, from Golding's sixteenth 

 century translation of what then passed as the production of 

 Solinus, and what may now pass, even according to Mommsen, 

 as quite old enough for my present purpose. It runs thus : 

 "From the Promontorie of Calydon to the Hand Thule is 

 two dayes sayling. Next come 'the lies called Hebudes, five 

 in number, the inhabiters whereof know not what come 

 meaneth, but Hue onely by fishe and milke. They are all 

 vnder the gouernment of one King. For as manie of them 

 as bee, they are seuered but with a narrowe groope one from 

 another. The King hath nothing of hys own, but taketh of 

 euery mans. He is bounde to equitie by certaine lawes : and 

 least he may start from right through couetousnesse, he 

 learneth Justice by pouertie, as who may have nothing proper 

 or peculiar to himselfe, but is found at the charges of the 

 Realme. Hee is not suffered to haue anie woman to himselfe, 

 but whomsoeuer he hath minde vnto, he borroweth her for a 

 tyme, and so others by turnes. Wherby it commeth to passe 

 that he hath neither desire nor hope of issue." 



The man who wrote in that way presumably failed to see that 

 the king was not subject to any special hardship as compared 

 with the other men in his kingdom, where none of them had 

 any offspring that he could individually call his own. This, be 

 it noticed, refers to the Hebrides, not, as sometimes happens, 

 to the more distant island of Thule, where there was also a king, 

 as any reader of " Faust " will tell us. 



We now come to the Celts, and begin with Pliny's version of 

 Cresar's words about the division of Gaul into three parts, as 

 follows : Gallia omnis Comata uno nomine appellata in tria 



NO. 161 2, VOL. 62] 



populorum genera dividitur, amnibus viaxime distineta. A 

 Scalde ad Sequattam Belgica, ab eo ad Garunnam Celtica 

 eademque Lugdtinensis, itide ad Pyrenaei montis excursum 

 AquHanica, Aremorica antea dicta. We may for the present 

 dismiss the third or Aquitanic Gaul from our minds ; but Belgic 

 and Celtican Gaul may be taken as representing the two sets of 

 Celts of our own islands. The Belgic Gauls began last to come 

 to this country, and their advent seems to fall between 

 the visits of Pytheas and Julius Caesar : that is, roughly 

 speaking, between the middle of the fourth century and that of 

 the first century B.c In this country they came to be known 

 collectively as Brittanni or Brittones, the linguistic ancestors of the 

 people who^have spoken Bry thonic or the Lingua Brittannica, such 

 as the Welsh, the Cornish, and the Strathclyde Britons. As to 

 the others Celts, it is much harder to say when or whence 

 exactly they came — I mean the linguistic ancestors of the Gaels 

 of Ireland, Man, and Scotland, that is to say, the peoples 

 whose language has been Goidelic. Some scholars are of 

 opinion that there were no Goidelic-speaking peoples in Britain 

 till some such came here from Ireland on sundry occasions, 

 beginning with the second century, in the time of the Roman 

 occupation, but how the Goidels would be supposed by them to 

 have reached Ireland I do not exactly know. My own notion 

 is that the bulk of them reached that country by way of Britain, 

 and that they arrived in Britain, like the Belgic Gauls later, 

 from the nearest parts of the Continent ; for this would be 

 previous to the appearance of the Belgic Gauls on the western 

 sea-board of Europe : that is to . say, at a time when Celtica 

 extended not merely to the Seine, but to the Scheldt or to the 

 Rhine, if not further. Then as to the time of the coming of the 

 ancestors of the Goidels, it has been supposed coincident with a 

 period of great movements among the Celts of the Continent, in 

 particular the movements which resulted, among other things, 

 in some of them reaching the shores of the Mediterranean and 

 penetrating to the heart of the Iberic peninsula. Perhaps one 

 would not be far wrong in fixing on the seventh and the sixth 

 centuries B.C. as covering the time of the coming of the earlier 

 Celts to our shores. 



In Britain I should suppose these earlier hordes of Celts to 

 have conquered most of the southern half of the island ; and 

 the Brythonic Celts, when they arrived, may have overrun much 

 the same area, pushing the Goidelic Celts more and more 

 towards the west. Under that pressure it is natural to suppose 

 that some of the latter made their way to Ireland, but it is 

 quite possible that their emigration thither had begun before. 

 Some time or other previous to the Roman occupation the 

 Brythonic people of the Ordovices seem to have penetrated to 

 the sea between the rivers Dovey and Mawddach, displacing 

 probably some Goidels who may have gone to the opposite 

 coasts of Ireland ; but more traces in Irish story appear of in- 

 vasions on the part of the Dumnonii, who possessed the coast 

 between Galloway and Argyle. These were so situated as to-- 

 be able to assail Ireland both in front and from behind, and 

 this is countenanced to some extent by Irish topography, not 

 to mention the long legends extant as to great wars in the west 

 of Ireland between the Tuatha De Danann and invaders in- 

 cluding the Fir Domnann. I suspect also that it was the 

 country of these northern Dumnonians which was origin- 

 ally meant by Lochlinn, a name interpreted later to mean 

 Norway. 



Such are some of the faint traces of the Goidelic invasions of 

 Ireland from Britain, but it is possible — perhaps probable — that 

 Ireland received settlers on its southern coast from the north- 

 west of Gaul at a comparatively late period, at the time, let us 

 say, when Ci«sar was engaged in crushing the Veneti and the 

 Aremoric League. This has been suggested to me by the 

 name of the Usdiae, which probably survives in the first 

 syllable of Ossory, denoting a tract of country now, roughly 

 speaking, covered by the county of Kilkenny, but which 

 may have been considerably larger before the Deisi took 

 possession of the baronies of the two Decies and other districts 

 now constituting the county of Waterford, not to mention 

 possible encroachments on the part of Munster on a boundary 

 which seems to have been sometimes contested. Now the 

 Continental name which invites comparison with that of 

 the Usdire is that of the Ostisei, who in the time of Pytheas 

 appear to have occupied the north-western end of what 

 afterwards came to be called Brittany ; they were also called 

 Ostiones, and more commonly Osismi. I see no reason 

 to suppose that the ships of the Aremoric League could not 



