WHAT'S IN A NAME? 



53 



Dieppedal, Darnetal, etc., remind us of all the dales in England. 

 Shaw = a shady place ; Bosc = a wood or bushy place ; Holt = a 

 wood, appear in Escoville, Escoves, Verbose, Bonnebosc, Grimbosq, 

 Terhoulde, Menehoulde. Hastingues, a river-island near Bayonne, 

 probably takes its name from the renowned Viking Hastings, and 

 the He de Biere in the Loire was no doubt so called from the huts 

 which the Danes erected upon it for the accommodation of their 

 prisoners. 



III. 

 THE CELTS. 



Europe has been peopled by successive immigrations from the 

 East. Five or six great waves of population have rolled in, each in 

 its turn urging the flood which had preceded it further and further 

 toward the West. 



The mighty Celtic flood can be distinctly traced in its progress 

 across Europe, till at length it was driven forward into the far west- 

 ern extremities of the continent. The Celts were divided into two 

 great branches. Both branches spoke languages of the same stock, 

 but distinguished by dialectic differences as great as those which di- 

 vide English from German. To the first branch belong the Erse of 

 Ireland, the Gaelic of the Scotch and the Manx ; to the second, or 

 Cymric, the Welsh of Wales and the Brezonec of Brittany, which is 

 still spoken by a million and a half or two million of Frenchmen. 



The river-names, more particularly the names of important 

 rivers, are everywhere the memorials of the earliest races. They 

 survive where all other names have changed. Towns may be de- 

 stroyed, the sites of human habitation may be removed, but the 

 ancient river-names are handed down from race to race. Teutonic,- 

 Romance villages stand on the banks of streams which still retain 

 their ancient Celtic appellations. Throughout the whole of England 

 there is hardly a single river-name which is not Celtic, and the same 

 may be said of France, with the exception of the Basque region. 

 There is, in fact, hardly a single Celtic noun meaning stream, cur- 

 rent, brook, channel, water or flood, or adjective meaning rough, 

 gentle, smooth, white, black, yellow, crooked, broad, swift, muddy, 

 clear, and the like, which does not enter largely into the river -names 

 of Europe. 



The usual Welsh word for a river is afon or avon. In little 



