October 8, 1886.] 



SCIENCE. 



329 



If, moreover, the teacher knows that Llan and 

 Kil mean a church. Tor a height, Innis or Ennis 

 or Inch an island or water-girt peninsula ; that 

 Lmn means a pool, as in London and Lincoln ; 

 that Nant means a valley, as in Nantwich, — if he 

 knows the meaning of these and a few other Celtic 

 words, he can put into the hands of his pupils a 

 key which will enable them to unlock the mean- 

 ing of hundreds of names, not only in Great Britain 

 and Ireland, but on the continent of Europe. 



Let us next take a very quick glance at the 

 earliest Roman contributions to our names of 

 Britisli places. These are only six, and they were 

 given to Britain and British times. They are 

 castra, strata {strata via), fossa, vallum, portus, 

 and colonia. One or two examples will be enough 

 for our purpose. There were in early British 

 Britain no roads worthy of the name ; and, as 

 soon as the Romans made up their minds to hold 

 this island, they set to work, and drove several 

 splendid roads through it from south to north. 

 First of all, from Richborough, near Dover, they 

 made a road, called Watling Street, tlu'ough Canter- 

 bury and London, by Stony Stratford, on to their 

 standing camp on the Dee, — the Castra of the 

 northern Roman army, which is still called simply 

 Chester. This road ran on through Westmoreland, 

 across the top of a mountain, which is called High 

 Street to this day. Ermin Street ran from London 

 to Lincoln ; Icknield Street, from Norwich to 

 Exeter ; and there were several other great roads. 

 But the point for the geographical learner is, that 

 these splendid works can still be traced, j^artly by 

 their actual remains, and partly by the names of 

 the Saxon towns that were of necessity built upon 

 them, and nowhere else. The word street enters 

 into the names of these towns in the character 

 either of a suffix or of a prefix. Thus we have 

 Streetham, Stretton, and Stratton ; Stretford and 

 Stratford ; Chester-le-Street and Ardwich-le-Sfcreet; 

 and a great many others. 



The corresponding word in Scandinavian lan- 

 guages is gate, which is a derivative of go, and 

 the Low-German form of the High-German gasse. 

 This word, however, we now find restricted to 

 streets; that is, roads in towns or cities. Thus 

 Edinburgh has its Cowgate and Canongate ; Dun- 

 dee, its Overgate and Nethergate (which some 

 weak persons wished to change into Victoria Street 

 and Albert Street) ; York, its Michlegate, Jubber- 

 gate, Castlegate, Fishergate, and sixteen others. 

 But the geographical inquirer, looking abroad, 

 finds a much wider application for the word. The 

 name indicates not merely a street in a town, but 

 also a street through lines of liill or cliff ; and in 

 this sense we have it in Reigate (which is Ridge- 

 gate), Margate, Sandgate, and the Ghauts of India 



(which are either passes through ranges of hills, 

 or passages down to the banks of the rivers). This 

 by the way. 



But the Latin word which contains for us the 

 largest amount of history is castra. And it not 

 only contains a great deal of Roman history : it 

 contains also a considerable amount of English 

 history. This word we find generally as a suffix 

 to our names of towns, and we find it in three 

 different forms, — caster, Chester, and cester. In 

 the Anglican kingdoms of the north it appears in 

 the form caster ; in the Saxon kingdoms it takes 

 the form of Chester ; and in Mercia, which was 

 mainly Anglican, but under Saxon influence, we 

 find the intermediate form of cester. But in the 

 district north of tlie Tees, the Saxon form Chester 

 re-appears ; and we find such names as Ribchester, 

 Chesterholm, Rutchester, and others. The two 

 forms Castor and Chester stand right opposite to 

 each other at one point in England. The river 

 Nen divides Northamptonshire, which is Danish, 

 from Hunttngdonshu-e, which is purely Saxon ; 

 and on the opposite banks, standing on either side 

 of the river, we find two villages, both with the 

 same name, but the one called Castor and the 

 other Chesterton. The main point, however, for 

 the young inquirer to notice, is that all these places 

 were at one time Roman camps ; and from the 

 number of these he can himself easily judge as to 

 the military character and social intensity of the 

 Roman occupation. 



We now come to the third layer of civilization 

 in this island, — the layer which was deposited by 

 the Teutons, who immigrated into this country 

 from the northern part of the land which we now 

 call Germany. This deposit began to be laid down 

 in Great Britain in the middle of the fifth century ; 

 and the character of this contribution to British 

 habits is best indicated by Mr. Isaac Taylor in his 

 ' Words and places.' He says, " England is pre- 

 eminently the land of hedges and enclosures. On 

 a visit to the continent, almost the first thing the 

 tourist notices is the absence of the hedgerows of 

 England. The fields, nay, even the farms, are 

 bounded only by a furrow." And he points to the 

 universally recurring terminations ton, ham, 

 worth, stoke, fold, park, and bury — all of which 

 convey the notion of enclosure or protection — as 

 proof of the seclusiveness of character of the 

 Anglo-Saxon, of how strongly " imbued was the 

 nation with the principle of the sacred nature of 

 property, and how eager every man was to possess 

 some spot which he coiild call his own." 



Now, if the learner is armed with the knowledge 

 and the meanings of these words, and with some 

 power of tracking them under their different forms, 

 he has the power of fixing upon the chief Anglo- 



