THE BRITISH OR LIGHT-TAILED SQUIRREL 689 



Saxon war="via.xy" or wcergenga, -which, means "one who retires to 

 lonely places, such as a wild beast," then the compound acwern might 

 signify literally " the animal which takes refuge in trees." 



Local names •.—(Non-Celtic) — Scopperil of Yorkshire ; thus " He 

 went up the tree loike a scoperil" ( Yorks. Weekly Post, 12th June 1897). 

 The original meaning of this word is given by Wright as a spinning- 

 top or teetotum. It is a Skandinavian word and a diminutive formed 

 from " skop" the root sense of which was the " skipper " from skopa, to 

 skip, of the Swedish (dialect), or "spinner" from the Icelandic skoppa, 

 " to spin like a top." The form scoperil was corrupted into scropel, also 

 a Yorkshire form given by Wright ; e.g., " I can hear th' boggarts 

 creeping, wick as scropels, fro' roof to cellar" (Sutcliffe, Shmneless 

 Wayne, 1900, vii.). 



Scrug of Hampshire (Wright) with its corruptions scug, skug, or 

 skugg, appears also to be of Skandinavian origin ; this name, in one 

 form or another, is in very general use throughout the greater part of 

 England, and Benjamin Franklin has recorded the fact that in his day 

 skugg was the common name for all squirrels in London. 



Swirrel, sweril, and swirl of the northern dialects are, of course, 

 merely variants or corruptions of squirrel. 



Con, or conn, is a name found in the northern dialects ; the earliest 

 reference cited in the New Engl. Diet, is to Burel's Pilgremer (in Watson, 

 Coll. Poems, ii., 20), dating from 1600, in which are the lines : — "There 

 wes the pikit porcupie, The cunning & the con all thrie." Harvie-Brown 

 states that the word is, or was, used in north Lancashire, southern 

 Cumberland, Westmoreland, and through the south of Scotland; he 

 says that the word is unknown in the north of Cumberland, and cites 

 Ferguson, who gives {Dial, of Cumberland) " con, a squirrel's nest ; in 

 Lonsdale, the squirrel," and who refers it to the Welsh cont, a tail. 

 Harvie-Brown further states that the word is now quite extinct in 

 southern Scotland, although it was known to Alastair M'Donald, who, 

 in 1771 translated the GiA&Y\.c feoirag as "a squirrel or conn." Accord- 

 ing to Harvie-Brown, Gaelic scholars are of opinion that the word is a 

 contraction of the Gaelic coinein, a rabbit, which they think is a dimin- 

 utive of cu, a dog. But, as the quotation from Burel given above shows, 

 early writers distinguished the con from the cuning. 



The nest of the squirrel is called a dray, drey, or drug in many of 

 the southern and midland counties of England (see White's Selborne, 

 Bennett's ed., 1837, 460 1). This word is of uncertain origin, but may 

 have been derived from the Anglo-Saxon dragan, to draw.^ Accord- 



' In footnote 2 to the page cited, Mitford states that the nest is called a bay in 

 Suffolk. 



^ We would suggest a possible derivation from the Anglo-Saxon drig, dreg, drug, 

 or dtyg= dry ; the dray being the place where the squirrel keeps high and dry. 



