5i8 



NA TURE 



[September 20, 1900 



make the voyage from Brittany to the principal landing- 

 places on the south of Ireland from the Harbour of Cork to 

 that of Waterford, and I gather from Ptolemy's Geography 

 that Ireland was relatively better known on the Continent 

 than Britain, although the latter had been in a manner con- 

 nected with the Roman world. This I should explain some- 

 what as follows : — Caesar, who knew very little about the west 

 of Britain and probably less about Ireland, says that in his time 

 the great druidic centre of Gaul was in the country of the 

 Camutes, somewhere, let us say, near the site of the present 

 town of Chartres, that druidism had been introduced from 

 Britain to Gaul, and that those who wished to understand it 

 had to go to Britain to study. The authors of antiquity tell us 

 otherwise nothing about druids in Britain except that Tacitus 

 speaks of such in the Annals, in his well-known passage as to 

 Suetonius Paulinus landing with his troops in Anglesey and the 

 scene of slaughter which ensued. Indeed, one may go further 

 and say that there is no proof that any Belgic or Brythonic 

 people ever had druids : they belonged to the Celtican Gauls 

 and the Goidelicising Celts of Britain and Ireland, who had 

 probably accepted the institution from the Pictish race. At any 

 rate it is significant that the Life of St. Columba introduces the 

 reader to a genuine druid at the court of the Pictish king, near 

 Inverness, where, as well as on Loch Ness, the saint had to 

 contend with him. In any case, it is highly probable that 

 druidism was no less a living institution in Ireland than in the 

 Goidelic and Pictish parts of Britain. Presumably it was more 

 so, and it may be conjectured that Gaulish students of druidism 

 visited Ireland no less than Britain ; also, vice versd, that Irish 

 druids paid visits to the Celtican part of Gaul where druidism 

 flourished on the Continent, and in a word that there was 

 regular intercourse between Gaul and the south of Ireland. If 

 the druids of Ireland, who, among other rdles, played that of 

 schoolmasters and teachers in that country, travelled to Celtica, 

 they must have spread on the Continent some information about 

 their native country, while generations of them cannot have 

 returned to Ireland, with their druidic pupils, without bringing 

 with them some of the arts of civilised life as understood in 

 Gaul : among these one must rank very decidedly the art of 

 writing, which the druids practised. Now you know the usual 

 account given of the ordinary Latin for Ireland, namely Hiherma 

 ■ — to wit, that it was suggested by such native names as that of 

 one of the greatest tribes of that country, namely the 'lot^epi/oj 

 or Iverni, and that it had its v ousted when Latin began about 

 the fourth century to write b for v, and that an h was then pre- 

 fixed to make the word Hibernia properly connote the wintry 

 climate which our sister island had always been supposed to 

 enjoy. But now comes the question, where did Pomponius 

 Mela, who flourished about the middle of the first century, get 

 his hiverna, which Juvenal also used ? Doubtless from a druid 

 like Dalan, or some other educated native of Ireland, for what 

 the editors print as luverna, luuerna, or /uverna would appear 

 in ancient manuscripts as ivverna or hiuerna, in which the first 

 two syllables are spelt correctly with v v according to a system 

 of spelling well known in Ogmic writing centuries later. But a 

 particular system of spelling seems to me to imply writing, and 

 thus one is encouraged to think that the Ogam alphabet may 

 have been invented no later than the first century in the inter- 

 course I have conjectured to have been going on between the 

 north-west of Gaul and the south of Ireland, where the 

 majority of Ogam inscriptions are now found. But what has 

 archaeology to say on the question of such intercourse ? 



After this digression I come back to the two main streams 

 of Celtic immigration from the same parts of the Continent in 

 two different periods of time. The later of these introduced 

 the Lingua Brittannica, which was practically a dialect of old 

 Gaulish ; but the affinities of the other Celtic language of these 

 islands, the Goidelic, are not so easy to determine. I have 

 long thought that I can identify traces of it on the Continent, 

 and that its principal home was in the region which Pliny called 

 Celtica, between the Garonne and the Seine. I ventured 

 accordingly to call it Celtican, as the simpler word Celtic 

 had already been wedded to a wider signification. Since 

 then the existence of that language has been placed 

 beyond doubt by the discovery of fragments of a calendar 

 engraved on bronze tablets. This find was made about the 

 end of 1897 at a place called Coligny, in the department 

 of the Ain, and the pieces are now in the museum at 

 Lyons. It is difficult to say for certain whether Coligny is 

 within the territory once occupied by the Sequani, or else by the 



KG. I612, VOL. 62] 



Ambarri, a people subject to the ^>dui, who were rivals of the 

 Sequani and Arverni. The name of the Sequani would seem to 

 have belonged to the Celtican language, and Mr. Nicholson, in 

 his interpretatiqi^ of the Calendar, has ventured in this instance 

 to call it Sequanian. But two inscriptions in what appears to 

 be the same language have come to light also at a place called 

 Rom, in the Deux Sevres and on the Roman road from Poitiers 

 to Saintes. This Celtican language is to be carefully distin- 

 guished from Gaulish, but it is not exactly what I expected it to 

 be : it is better. For several of the phonetic changes character- 

 istic of Goidelic had not taken place in Celtican. Among other 

 things it preserves intact the Aryan consonant p, which has 

 since mostly disappeared in Goidelic, as it had even then in 

 Gaulish. This greater conservatism of Celtican enables one to 

 refer to it the national appellation of the people of the region in 

 question, namely, that of the Pictones, from which it is impos- 

 sible to sever the name of the Picts of Britain and Ireland, who 

 are found also called Pictones and Pictanei. Here I may 

 mention that Mr. Nicholson calls attention to instances of 

 tattooing on some of the faces on ancient coins belonging to 

 Poitou and other parts of western France. In the light of the 

 names here in question one sees that pictos was a Celtican word 

 of the same etymology, and approximately, doubtless, of the 

 same meaning, as the Latin word pictus, that the Cellicans 

 had applied it at an early date to the Picts on account of their 

 habit of tattooing themselves, and that the Picts had accepted it 

 (with its derivative Pictones) so generally that by the time when 

 the Norsemen arrived in the North of Scotland, it was the name 

 which the natives gave them as that by which they called them- 

 selves. That is practically proved by the Norsemen calling 

 Caithness and Sutherland Petta-land or the Land of the Picts, 

 and the sea washing its northern shore Pettalands fiorth, which 

 survives modified into Pentland Firth. 



Another Celtican word of great interest here has by a mere 

 chance come down in a high German manuscript written before 

 the year 814 ; it is Chortonicuvi, and occurs among a number 

 of geographical names, several of which refer to Gaul, so that 

 Chortonicum may very well have meant the country of the 

 Pictones. At all events, the great German philologist. Pott, at 

 once saw that it was to be explained by reference to the word 

 Cruithne, " a Pict," with which it decidedly goes as distinguished 

 from its Brythonic equivalent Prydyn (or the older Priten), with 

 an initial/. The Celtican form originally meant was some such 

 vocable as Qurtonico-n, with the qu which was usual in Celtican 

 and early Goidelic, where it formed, in fact, one of the most 

 conspicuous distinctions between those languages and Brythonic 

 or Gaulish, in which qu had been changed into/. 



My remarks have again run into tiresome details, but it is only 

 by attending to such small points that one can hope to force 

 language to yield us any information in the matter of ethnology. 

 It may perhaps help in some measure if I sum up what I have 

 been trying to say, thus : 



The first race we have found in possession of the British Isles 

 consisted of a small, swarthy population of mound-dwellers, of 

 an unwarlike disposition, much given to magic and wizardry, 

 and perhaps of Lappish affinities / its attributes have been 

 exaggerated or otherwise distorted in the evolution of the Little 

 People of our fairy tales. 



The next race consisted of a taller, blonder people, with blue 

 eyes, who tattooed themselves and fought battles. These tattooed 

 or Pictish people made the Mound Folk their slaves, and in the 

 long run their language may be supposed to have been modified 

 by habits of speech introduced by those slaves of theirs from 

 their own idiom. The affinities of these Picts may be called 

 Libyan, and possibly Iberian. 



Next came the Celts in two great waves of immigration, the 

 first of which may have arrived as early as the seventh century 

 before our era, and consisted of the real ancestors of some or 

 our Goidels of the Milesian stock, and the linguistic ancestors 

 of all the peoples who have spoken Goidelic. That language 

 may be defined as Celtican so modified by the idioms of the 

 population which the earlier Celts found in possession that its 

 syntax is no longer Aryan. 



Then, about the third century B.C., came from Belgica the 

 linguistic ancestors of the peoples who have spoken Brythonic ; 

 but, in the majority of cases connected with modern Brythonic, 

 they are to be regarded as Goidels who adopted Brythonic 

 speech, and in so doing brought into that language their 

 Goidelic idioms, with the result that the syntax of insular 

 Brythonic is no less non-Aryan than that of Goidelic, as may 



