M. L. ROUSE, B.L., ON THE PEDIGREE OF THE NATIONS. 97 



but now Tarascon ; on the Gallic slopes of the Pyrenees east- 

 ward a mediseval Castrum Tarasco, now also Tarascon ; and iu 

 Aquitania, on the northern spurs of the Pyrenees, the tribe 

 Tarusates.* After this no relic of the patriarchal name is found 

 with any certainty. The point in the westward migration was- 

 here so remote and must have taken so many ages to reach^ 

 that the forefathers' name, if forefather he was, at last dropped 

 into oblivion ; but the fact that it appears up to the end of the- 

 northern side of the Pyrenees, and disappears upon the south 

 side, shows both that the first colonists of Spain crossed these 

 mountains to enter that country, and that they crossed very 

 slowly and gradually. It is true that the prefix Tu-r- occurs in 

 the names of many tribes or places both north and south of 

 the Pyi'enees ; but Isaac Taylor informs us that this is cut 

 short from a Basque or Iberian word meaning fountain : and 

 this brings us to the other plan of linking the nations together — 

 the one so largely adopted in my former paper. 



The Basques now occupy the south-west corner of France 

 below the Adour, and the tlnee small adjoining provinces of 

 Spain called the Biscayan : they are the last remnant of the Iberi,. 

 who once occupied the whole of Spain and a much larger corner 

 of Prance than now, known as Aquitania, and extending up tO' 

 the Garumna. Long before the Eoman conquest of Spain,, 

 liowever, the Kelts, or Gauls, had penetrated through their 

 lines, probably after forcing them back from a still larger 

 Aquitania, and had established a purely Keltic nation in the 

 north-west of the peninsula known as the Callaici (now as the 

 Galicians), and a nation of mingled blood in the centre — the- 

 Celtiberi. Xow, to find out whether these Iberi had previously 

 settled in any other part of Europe, let us take some of their 

 commonest geographical prefixes and suffixes, and see if we 

 can find them in other countries ; and, above all, if we can 

 thus identify the Iberi, or Basques, with tlie Ligurians and 

 Etruscans, for then we sliall have proved the progeny of Tiras 

 to have reached and colonised Spain also. 



Firstly, asta in Basque means a rock ; and we have Hasta 

 (now Asta) in Baetica, or southern Iberian Spain :: 

 Hasta in Etruria, and Hasta, or Asta (now Asti), in 

 Italian Liguria ; as we also have Astacus and its gulf- 

 in Bithynia, and Astai, a population in Thrace. 



^ Compare also Tarus (now Taio), the name of a river in Itahait 

 Liguria, which runs past Parma into the Padus (Po). 



