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SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XII. No. 301. 



mologist you could invite to explain them ; 

 and why? Because they belong in all 

 probability to a non-Celtic, non- Aryan lan- 

 guage of some race that had early posses- 

 sion of our islands. ISTevertheless, it is very 

 desirable that we should have full lists of 

 such names, so as to see which of them 

 recur and where. It is a subject deserving 

 the attention of this Section of the British 

 Association. 



We have now loitered long enough in the 

 gloom of the Pict's house. Let us leave the 

 glamor of the fairies and see whether any 

 other race has had a footing in these islands 

 before the coming of the Celts. In August, 

 1891, Professor Sayce and I spent some fine 

 days together in Kerry and other parts of 

 the southwest of Ireland. He was then 

 full of his visits to N"orth Africa, and he 

 used to assure me that, if a number of Ber- 

 bers from the mountains had been trans- 

 ferred to a village in Kerry and clad as 

 Irishmen, he would not have been able to 

 tell them by their looks from native Irish- 

 men such as we saw in the course of our 

 excursions. This seemed to me at the time 

 all the more remarkable as his reference was 

 to fairly tall blue-eyed persons whose hair 

 was rather brown than black. Evidence to 

 the same effect might now be cited in detail 

 from Professor Haddon and his friends' re- 

 searches among the population of the Arran 

 Islands in Galway Bay. Such is one side 

 of the question which I have in my mind ; 

 the other side consists in the fact that the 

 Celtic languages of to-day have been sub- 

 jected to some disturbing influence which 

 has made their syntax unlike that of the 

 other Aryan languages. I have long been 

 of opinion that the racial interpretation of 

 that fact must be that the Celts of our 

 islands have assimilated another race, using 

 a language of its own, in which the syntac- 

 tical peculiarities of ]SJ"eo- Celtic had their 

 origin ; in fact, that some such race clothed 

 its idioms in the vocabulary which it ac- 



quired from the Celts. The problem then 

 was to correlate those two facts. I am 

 happy to say this has now been undertaken 

 irom the language point of view by Profes- 

 sor J. Morris Jones, of the University Col- 

 lege of ISTorth Wales. The results have 

 been made public in a book on ' The Welsh 

 People ' recently published by Mr. Fisher 

 Unwin. The paper is entitled ' Pre-Celtic 

 Syntax in Insular Celtic,' and the lan- 

 guages which have therein been compared 

 with Celtic are old Egyptian and certain 

 dialects of Berber. It is all so recent that we 

 have as yet had no criticism, but the reason- 

 ing is so sound and the arguments are of so 

 cumulative a nature, that I see no reason 

 to anticipate that the professor's conclu- 

 sions are in any danger of being over- 

 thrown. 



At the close of his linguistic argument, 

 Professoi- Morris Jones quotes a French au- 

 thority to the effect that when a Berber 

 king dies or is deposed, which seems to 

 happen often enough, it is not his son that 

 is called to succeed him, but the son of his 

 sister, as appears to have been usual among 

 certain ancient peoples of this country; but 

 of this more anon. -In the next place, my 

 attention has been called by Professor Sayce 

 to the fact that ancient Egyptian monu- 

 ments represent the Libyans of North Africa 

 with their bodies tattooed, and that even 

 now some of the Touaregs and Kabyles do 

 the same. These indications help one to 

 group the ancient peoples of the British 

 Isles to whose influence we are to ascribe 

 the non- Aryan features of Neo-Celtic. In 

 the flrst place, one cannot avoid fixing on 

 the Picts, who were so called because of 

 their habit of tattooing themselves. For as 

 to that fact there seems to be no room for 

 doubt, and Mr. Nicholson justly lays stress 

 on the testimony of the Greek historian 

 Herodian, who lived in the time of Severus, 

 and wrote about the latter's expedition 

 against the natives of North Britain a long 



