TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION H. 895 



or Iverni, and that it had its v ousted when Latin began about the 4th 

 century to write b for v, and that an h was then prefixed to make the 

 word Hiberm'a properly connote the wintry climate which our sister island had 

 always been supposed to enjoy. But now comes the question, where did Pom- 

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

 luverna, which Juvenal also used? Doubtless from a driiid like Daldn, or 

 some other educated native of Ireland; for what the editors print as luverna, 

 luuerna, or Juverna, would appear in ancient manuscripts as ivverna or 

 iuuerna, in which the first two syllables are spelt correctly with v v according to 

 a system of spellino- well known in Ogmic writing centuries later. But a parti- 

 cular 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 intercourse I have conjectured to have been going on between 

 the north-west of Gaul and the south of Ireland, where the majority of Oo-am 

 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 iiumi"-ra- 

 tion, 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 ven- 

 tured accordingly to call it Celticnn, as the simpler word Cc4tic had already been 

 wedded to a wider signification. Since I did so 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 Coiigny is within the territory 

 once occupied by the Sequani, or else by the Ambarri, a people subject to the 

 ^Edui, who were the rivals of the Sequani and Arverni. The name of the Sequani 

 would seem to have belonged to the Cekican language, and Mr. Nicholson, in his 

 interpretation 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 distinguished 

 fi'om Gaulish, but it is not exactly what I expected it to be : it is better. For 

 several of the phonetic changes characteristic of Goidelic had not taken place in 

 Celtican. Among other things it preserves intact the Aryan consonant jh 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 impossible 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 ^jjcfos was a Celtican 

 word of the same etymology, and approximately, doubtless, of the same meaning, as 

 the Latin word jiictus, that the Celticans 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 themselves. 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 Jiorth, 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 Ckortonicum, 

 and it occurs among a number of geographical names, several oi -which refer to Gaul, 



