APRIL 71 



which occurs in every country, and must find expression 

 in every language under the sun — the tract ' between the 

 rivers' Tigris and Euphrates, called by the Arabs El 

 Gezira, which signifies much the same thing. In English 

 we have the exact equivalent in Twining in Gloucester- 

 shire and Twynholm in Galloway, which represent the 

 Anglo-Saxon tweon, between, and eaum or edn, the dative 

 (or locative) plural of ed, a river. Gaelic has its Eddra- 

 chillis in Sutherlandshire — eadar chaolas, between the 

 firths, and Ederavon in Dunbartonshire — eadar am- 

 huinn, between the rivers ; German, its Interlacken and 

 Coblentz (from the Latin Confluentes) ; Italian, Terni and 

 Teramo, contracted forms of inter amines; and Spanish 

 its Entre Kios, the district in Argentina between the 

 rivers Parana and Uruguay. 



The first thing, then, to bear in mind in any attempt 

 to study place-names is their uniform simplicity. Most 

 people not fluent in Welsh would recoil from the en- 

 deavour to construe LlanfairpwUgwyngyllgogerchwyrny. 

 drobwilliandisilliogogogoch ; nevertheless we may rest 

 assured that it is an attempt in perfectly good faith to 

 describe a certain place so that it shall not be mistaken 

 for another. The next thing to note is the remarkable 

 permanence of some of these names. Most of the habit- 

 able parts of the globe have been tenanted in succession 

 by waves of different races, each speaking a different 

 language from its predecessors, yet each adopting for 

 convenience some of the names they found attached to 

 hills, streams, woods, and fields. Diodorus Siculus, writing 

 in the last century before Christ, has preserved two place- 

 names apparently in the language of the small dark-haired 

 folk who occupied Britain before it was overrun by the 



