402 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



Iberians ? The obvious resource is to turn to the Basque as 

 spoken at the present day in Spain ; and it appears that the 

 genuine Basque word for a Babbit is unchi. We must remember 

 that this word has in the course of two thousand years probably 

 undergone some mutilation, though to what extent we cannot tell. 

 It may have been preceded by an aspirate, or a guttural ; in any 

 case, it seems likely that the Greeks saw in the Basque word 

 enough resemblance to their word for a dog (uvuv) to coin a 

 bastard diminutive to express the strange animal which they 

 hastily and popularly identified with the dog. The " Prairie- 

 dog," or Marmot, we know to have been christened on this prin- 

 ciple ; and we know also how common it is for settlers in a new 

 country to call unknown animals by the names of old-world 

 species to which they happen to bear some fancied resemblance. 

 The Greeks then will have called the Babbit "the little dog"; 

 the Bomans, more practical, will have taken the name from the 

 Greek, and by a false etymology called it " the splitter," as indeed 

 they were accustomed to think of ploughing as " finder e terram" 

 As for the name which the Babbit has received in other 

 languages (and it has received some very hard ones in Australia), 

 it may be remarked that there is no native word for Babbit in 

 any Celtic language ; and this fact points to its comparatively 

 late introduction into Great Britain.* The Irish word coinin, 

 Gaelic coinean (probably by popular etymology connected with 

 the Gaelic name for a horse), the Welsh civning, and the Cornish 

 cynin, all seem, like the English coney, to be borrowed from the 

 French connin. The Breton konicl, or kounikl, comes directly 

 from the Latin cimiculus. The German kaninchen implies an 

 original word kanin, which has passed into High German under 

 different forms. It has passed into popular German under the 

 form kuniclin, and kiinchel, probably under the influence of 

 konigin, as if it were " the royal" animal. The Slavs, again, call 

 the Babbit, for some reason, krdlik or krolik, " the royal animal," 

 the Slavish word for royal, coming probably from the name of 

 Charles the Great. The Spanish conejo explains itself. The 

 French word lapin is assumed to be a crippled form of " clapin" 

 so that the original French conception of the Babbit would be 

 the " squatting" animal, which reminds us of the Greek designa- 

 tion of the Hare as the " cowering" animal, and I find that 



* See ' The Zoologist,' 1883, p. 482.— Ed. 



