SECTIONAL TRANSACTIONS.—G, H. 517 
REPORTS OF RESEARCH COMMITTEES (10.45) :— 
Earth Pressures. 
Electrical Terms and Definitions. 
Stresses in Overstrained Materials. 
SECTION H.—ANTHROPOLOGY. 
Thursday, September 7. 
Mr. K. H. Jacxson.—An aspect of Celtic seasonal literature : the weather 
prophecy (10.0). 
The primitive mantic tradition in Ireland included prognostications of 
weather and fertility as well as prophecies relating to human affairs, the two 
not being separated but treated as general manifestations of prosperity or 
the reverse, and traces of the same kind are found in Wales ; certain obscure 
Irish poems are to be explained in this way rather than as charms or descrip- 
tions, but the distinction between charm and prophecy is not always easy 
to draw. Various systems of foretelling the weather other than by direct 
inspiration, particularly from observations about New Year’s Day ; perhaps 
originally part of the native mantic and seasonal lore, but later much 
influenced by the Latin learned tradition and disinfected from the taint of 
paganism by Christian formule. Survivals in modern Celtic folklore. 
The possibility that weather prophecies influenced seasonal poetry ; 
similarities of phrasing common to the mantic poems and prose weather-lore 
are perhaps to be found in some of the Irish poems on the seasons, and also 
traces of Welsh weather-wisdom in an early Welsh poem on winter. 
Prof. Dr. Juttus Pokorny.—The origin of the Celts (10.45). 
People usually look for the Celtic cradle to south-west Germany and 
the Rhineland, where are found the greatest number of Celtic river-names, 
and where later the historical Celtic La Téne culture originated from the 
western Hallstatt culture; in the Bronze, Age the so-called Tumulus 
culture was found there. 
Of late it has become evident that at about 1200 B.C., important move- 
ments of peoples and cultures had gone to transform the cultural aspect of 
the greater part of Europe. ‘The people of the Lausitz culture or urnfield 
civilisation, starting from eastern Germany and western Poland, seem to 
have conquered great parts of middle and southern Europe, among them 
the Celtic cradle, where they became finally absorbed by the earlier Tumulus 
folk. In this way the Celts of history came into existence. 
The language of the urnfield people gives us an important clue to the 
origin of the Celts. The urnfield colonies in Hungary and Upper Italy 
can be shown to belong to the Illyrians and Venetians, two branches of the 
western Aryans, and the great number of Veneto-Illyrian place- and river- 
names in the Lausitz territory point to the same direction. The linguistic 
isolation of the Teutonic languages (for the relations with Celtic are late) 
is easily explained by the fact that their southern and eastern frontiers were 
occupied by Veneto-Illyrian peoples, of whose language, the ancestor of 
modern Albanian, we know very little. 
