OCTOBEE 5, 1900.] 



SCIENCE. 



507 



case he was at last successful, and his king 

 hurried at the head of an army to Bri 

 Leith, where they began in earnest to de- 

 molish Mider's mound. At this Mider was 

 so frightened that he sent the queen forth 

 to her husband, who then departed, leaving 

 the fairies to digest their wrath ; for it is 

 characteristic of them that they did not 

 fight, but bided their time for revenge, 

 which in this case did not come till long 

 after Eochaid's day. Now, with regard to 

 the fairy king, one is not told, so far as I 

 can call to mind, that he was a dwarf, but 

 the dwarfs were not far off; for we read of 

 an Irish satirist who is represented as no- 

 torious for his stinginess ; and, to empha- 

 size the description of his inhospitable hab- 

 its, he is said to have taken from Mider 

 three of his dwarfs and stationed them 

 around his own house, in order that their 

 truculent looks and rude words might repel 

 any of the men of Erin who might come 

 seeking hospitality or bringing any incon- 

 venient request. The word used for dwarf 

 in this story is corr, which is usually the 

 Irish for a crane or heron, but here, and in 

 some other instances, which I cannot now 

 discuss, it seems to have been identical with 

 the Brythonic cor, ' a dwarf.' It is remark- 

 able, moreover, that the role assigned to 

 the three Irish corrs is much the same as 

 that of the dwarf of Edeyrn son of Nudd, 

 in the Welsh story of Geraint and Enid and 

 Chretien de Troies' Erec, which character- 

 izes him as fel et de put'eire, 'treacherous 

 and of an evil kind. ' 



By way of summarizing these notes on 

 the Mound Folk I may say that I should 

 regard them as isolated and wretched rem- 

 nants of a widely spread race possessing 

 no political significance whatsoever. But, 

 with the inconsistency characteristic of 

 everything connected with the fairies, one 

 has, on the other hand, to admit that this 

 strange people seems to have exercised on 

 the Celts — probably on other races as well 



— a sort of permanent spell of mysterious- 

 ness and awe stretching to the verge of 

 adoration. In fact, Irish literature states 

 that the pagan tribes of Erin before the ad- 

 vent of St. Patrick used to worship the 

 side or the fairies. Lastly, the Celt's faculty 

 of exaggeration, combined with his inca- 

 pacity to comprehend the weird and un- 

 canny population of the mounds and caves 

 of his country, has enabled him, in oneway 

 or another, to bequeath to the great litera- 

 tures of Western Europe a motley train of 

 dwarfs and little people, a whole world of 

 wizardry, and a vast wealth of utopianism. 

 If you subtracted from English literature, 

 for example, all that has been contributed 

 to its vast stores from this native source, 

 you would find that you left a wide and un- 

 welcome void. 



But the question must present itself 

 sooner or later, with what race outside 

 these islands we are to compare or identify 

 our mound-dwellers. I am not prepared to 

 answer, and I am disposed to ask our ar- 

 cheologists what they think. In the mean- 

 time, however, I may say that there are 

 several considerations which impel me to 

 think of the Lapps of the North of Europe. 

 But even supposing an identity of origin 

 were to be made out as between our ancient 

 mound-inhabiting race and the Lapps, it 

 would remain still doubtful whether we 

 could expect any linguistic help from Lap- 

 land. The Lapps now speak a language 

 belonging to the TJgro-Finnic family, but 

 the Lapps are not of the same race as the 

 Finns ; so it is possible that the Lapps have 

 adopted a Finnish language and that they 

 did so too late for their present language 

 to help us with regard to any of our lin- 

 guistic difficulties. One of these lies in our 

 topography : take, for instance, only the 

 names of our rivers and brooks — there is 

 probably no county in the kingdom that 

 would be too small to supply a dozen or two 

 which would bafile the cleverest Aryan ety- 



