18 Proceedings of Royal Society of Edinburgh. [sess. 
by their personal names, followed by those of their fathers with 
daltir added ; men are for the most part referred to in the same 
manner, but with sen instead of dattir , while occasionally they 
adopt the name of their place of abode or birth instead of a 
patronymic. In the present list one man has a surname which has 
probably been introduced from southern Denmark or from the 
Schleswig-Holstein provinces, namely Djurhuus, while another has 
simply taken the name of his birthplace, Gjoueraa, a small village 
on the island of Stromoe, surnames being by no means a fixed 
institution in the country districts of the Faroes even at the 
present day, though they have gone far further in this direction 
than in Iceland. It is also worthy of note that a very large pro- 
portion of the names in my list are Biblical, and only a very small 
proportion Horse; while in a similar number of names from 
Iceland the majority would probably be found to be such as Gisli, 
Herjolfur, Arni, or the popular Magnus —a name introduced into 
Scandinavian countries through a misunderstanding of the latinized 
name of Charlemagne, a very popular hero in the ballads of the 
Faroes as in other Horse folk-lore. 
The Faroes, we know, were colonised by vikings of Horse ex- 
traction, many of whom were also descended from the Iberian chief- 
tains of the Hebrides and Ireland. There is no reason whatever to 
think that the islands had other human denizens when the vikings 
came, except perhaps occasional anchorites seeking to outdo the 
records of their fellows in the way of finding ‘ solitudes.’ There 
is good reason, however, to believe that Faroe, or, as it is properly 
spelt, Fseroe, means ‘sheep island,’ though Landt (5) gives other 
derivations, and that the group got its present name because the 
vikings found a breed of sheep already established there; and if 
this assumption be correct, the fact is difficult of explanation 
without supposing either that the island had already been 
colonised by some race which had disappeared, or else that the 
sheep had originally been accidentally introduced by a wreck, as 
was the case with the “great” or brown rat (5) in 1768. The breed 
appears to have been similar to that of Soa in St Kilda, but is 
now quite extinct, having been purposely exterminated by the 
islanders ; it could hardly have come spontaneously into being on 
small islands separated by a very deep channel from any consider- 
