524 Rude Stone Antiquities of Brittany. By Miss Russell. 



Ketones and Mandubians to make it probable that the French, 

 on the Celtic side of their ancestry, are, partly at least, allied to 

 the old Gael of Scotland and of the north of Ireland ; while I 

 am convinced there must be a larger proportion of Cymric blood 

 remaining in the south of Scotland than I had supposed, and a 

 great deal more than is generally supposed. Dr Angus Smith, 

 who studied the physiognomy and voice, said he could nowhere see 

 the Welsh face in Scotland, and that the Cumbrian Britons must 

 have been rather a ruling caste than a nation. But while this is 

 not altogether inconsistent with what we know about them, the 

 "Welsh face carries its own evidence that the ancestors of the 

 nation must have belonged in great part to the dark race who 

 were not Celts of any kind, whether they were exactly what we 

 call Basques or not. In many of the Hebrides the people remain 

 dark, or more correctly black-haired, in spite of the Celtic language 

 and long Norwegian occupation. The Basques of the Pyrenees 

 are said to be by no means an unmixed race now, but they have 

 a peculiar type, of rather fair skin with usually dark hair. 



The name the Bretons call themselves by is fireiz, meaning 

 "warriors;" the Welsh Brython or Briton, which undoubtedly 

 means "painted," might develope naturally enough from this, 

 after the Celts and Cymri of the Continent gave up tatooing and 

 painting, that is, painting in blue. 



It was long ago suggested by one of the district-historians of 

 Yorkshire that Brig antes may have meant warriors, partly from 

 the probability that the French brigand, robber, might have been 

 a degraded form of the same word. The analogy with the Scotch 

 cateran, warrior or robber, according to the part of the country 

 it is used in, is very exact. 



I cannot help thinking that Gadel, the word which turns into 

 Gael, is connected with Cat, Cad, Battle. I have no doubt that 

 the Dingad ab Nudd Hael who, with many other members of the 

 ruling families, appears among the Welsh saints, is Gwynn, the 

 Warrior from the Hills ; if he was killed fighting the heathen 

 Saxons, ho would very likely be regarded as a martyr. The wife 

 of Dingad was a daughter of Llew Loth, and Gwynn alludes to 

 " the daughter of Lud," in the poem in which he is a speaker. 

 Another brother is also a saint under the designation of Llid- 

 uerth; llednerth means "wide power" in Welsh, and may as 

 well apply to Cetilous, the elder brother of the Yarrow inscrip- 

 tion, as to anybody else. 



