638 Proceedings of the Royal Irhh Academy. 



account for the essential feature of the name, Avliich is the union of 

 two rivers. The name in course of time became ahbreviated, and 

 appears now as Collide, and in German territory as Conz. 



If these observations are well founded the employment of da in 

 place-names had its origin in a remote period. The earliest Celtic 

 inhabitants must have given those names to the places referred to on 

 their first arrival in Gaul; and as the Celtae are found occupying their 

 present positions at the dawn of history, the names must have been 

 bestowed in prehistoric times. An attempt has lately been made to 

 estimate the period of their arrival. In the second volume of Mr. 

 Alfred Xutt's work on the " Yoyage of Bran," which has just been 

 publislicd, he says : — " About 1000-800 b.c. began in all probability 

 the migration of the Celtic Aryans." Taking the lowest of these 

 figures, 800, this would assign an antiquity of between two and three 

 thousand years to those names. 



This preference for the number two appears also, as I have men- 

 tioned, in other ways, as, e.g., in the case of travelled Irishmen, wlio 

 were termed ' men of two countries,' no matter how many strange 

 lands they may have visited. It appears in the tale of " The Two 

 Sorrows of the Kingdom of Heaven," and in the list of ' pairs' of saints 

 in the Book of Leinster. The practice seems to have continued down 

 to modem times, and names have even been altered so as to introduce 

 the number two. Thus Downpatrick, originally Bmi-leth-glaise, 

 ' The fort beside the river,' became afterwards Dun-dd-leth-glas, inter- 

 preted by Jocelyn, ' The fort of the two broken fetters.' So also we 

 have Tir-glas, ' The land of streams,' afterwards changed to Tir-dd- 

 glas, * Land of two streams.' 



There stiU. remains the inquiry as to the origin of this usage. 

 "Whiy had the Celt such a predilection for the number two ? "When 

 the Eomans spoke of the junction of the Ehine and the Moselle, they 

 simply called it confluentes (Coblentz), but the Celtic inhabitant would 

 call it caudate, ' the meeting place of two rivers.' "Wliat is the reason 

 of the difference ? In considering this question we have to bear in 

 mind the immensely remote period at which the Celts arrived in Gaul 

 and we may conclude with certainty that they were in a very low 

 state of culture. Professor Boyd Dawkins considers them to have 

 been in that condition known as ' the stone age.' What this implies 

 may be gathered from what is known of the native races of Australia, 

 for instance. According to Mr. Tyler, the Xew Hollanders have no 

 names for numbers beyond two, nor have the aborigines of Victoria. 

 In connexion with this fact, the existence of the dual number is of 



