October 5, 1900.] 



SCIENCE. 



515 



ancient manuscripts as IVVEBNA or iuuerna, 

 in which the first two syllables are spelt 

 correctly with v v according to a system of 

 spelling well known in Ogmic writing cen- 

 turies 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 northwest of Gaul 

 and the south of Ireland, where the majority 

 of Ogam inscriptions are now found. But 

 what has archeology 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 aflinities of the other 

 Celtic language of these islands, the Goi- 

 delic, 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 Celtie had already 

 been wedded to a wider signification. 

 Since then the existence of that language 

 has been placed beyond doubt by the dis- 

 covery 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 occu- 

 pied by the Sequani, or else by the Am- 

 barri, 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. Kieholsou, 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 Bom, 

 in the Deux Sevres and on the Roman road 

 from Poitiers to Saintes. This Celtican 

 language is to be carefully distinguished 

 from 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 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 na- 

 tional 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 at- 

 tention 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 pietus, that the Celticans had 

 applied it at an early date to the Picts on 

 account of their habit of tattooing them- 

 selves, and that the Picts had accepted it 

 (with its derivative Pictones) so generally 

 that by the time when the Norsemen ar- 

 rived 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 fiorth, which sur- 

 vives 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 



