216 TRANSACTIONS OF THE PLYMOUTH INSTITUTION. 
been derived from a 'personal name, and this proposition was 
afterwards elaborated by Major Edye. 
Instead of this, Defoe, in 1724, speaks of these rocks as being 
named "from their situation." 
A century and a quarter ago, although spelling the name of the 
rocks "Edystone," Smeaton says, "They are supposed to have got 
this appellation from the great variety of contrary sets of the 
tide or currents amongst and in the vicinity thereof." And after 
explaining the reasons for the great irregularity of these currents, 
he proceeds, "Therefore they may very properly be termed, as 
they are, the Edystone Kocks." 
Polwhele, Oulton, and others, following on Smeaton, give the 
same derivation ; and Kobert Mudie, Gaelic professor at Inverness, 
in his Companion to Gilbert's New Map of England and Wales, 
in 1839, thus writes (p. 52): "The once dreaded and dreadful 
rock of the Eddystone, which literally means 'the stone of the 
reeling waves, 7 a truly descriptive appellation, lies . . . near the 
point where the strongest eddy of the bay holds conflict with the 
tide round the Lizard." 
These were not men who were likely to be led away with 
superficial views of philology, or false ideas of analogy, based on 
mere phonetic similarity. If there were no eddies at the reef, 
and yet from the fact of the prefix Ede, Edi, or Edy, having a 
similar sound to the ordinary word eddy, the derivation had 
thereupon been assumed from the supposed physical characteristics 
of the spot, there would be room to doubt the correctness of the 
assumption. But in this case every thing fits. The eddies are 
there, there is no doubt about that, and the earliest forms of the 
prefix are Ide and Ede, both of which it is admitted would be 
likely changes from the Norse r5a = an eddy. 
And while these and succeeding forms continued to be spelled 
in a manner etymologically correct, the d into which the hard 
Anglo-Saxon th had been changed remained single. 
But the use concurrently of the forms with two d's clearly 
shows, by evidence over two hundred years old, that the then 
new spelling of the word " eddy " was held to signify, in combi- 
nation as Eddy-stone, that Ede, Edi, and Edy, were only earlier 
spellings of the same word, indicating a "whirl of waters." 
