When the Romans became first acquainted with the Celts there were two Gauls,—Cisalpine Gaul or Northern Italy, and Transalpine or Greater Gaul, which included not only France but also Belgium, all that part of Germany west of the Rhine, and Western Switzerland. Whether any Celtic tribes lived east of the Rhine since the attack of the Gauls on Rome, and whether the frontier of the Germans and Celts was a fixed one within historic times or a constantly advancing one, are questions which we have not space to discuss, nor, if we had, would it be profitable to do so in the absence of any real facts to work upon. To the Continental Celtic ground above defined we have to add the British Islands.

The determination of the limits of the Celtic ground is based chiefly on linguistic evidence. Unfortunately, as regards the Continental part, our materials are scant, and hence a good deal of room is left for the imagination. Thus it has been much discussed whether the language spoken in every part of ancient Gaul was the same. Some have asserted that the Belgians were Germans, and therefore spoke a Teutonic tongue, and that even the Celtic dialect spoken north of the Loire differed considerably from that spoken south of that river in Aquitaine. This opinion was based upon a well-known passage in Caesar’s History of the Gallic War, in which he states that Gaul was divided into three parts which differed among themselves in language, institutions, and laws. This may mean either that three distinct languages were spoken, or if but one language, that there were three well-marked dialects. Μ. Roget de Belloguet has shown from a careful investigation of all ancient authorities, and an analysis of nearly 400 Gaulish words gathered from ancient authors and inscriptions, that the differences in question were dialectic, and that, save, perhaps, in those parts occupied by a Ligurian or Basque people, the same language was spoken in all GauL

Community of language does not, however, necessarily imply community of race. People having no kinship may speak the same language, while others nearly akin may speak widely different languages. This has been found to have been the case in Gaul as elsewhere. One language was spoken by two races which gradually fused into one people—a northern, fair-haired, blue-eyed race, of tall stature, lymphatic temperament, and elongated heads, and a southern race, shorter in stature and dry and nervous in temperament, having brown or black hair and eyes and round heads. The free or dominant class of Gauls belonged to the former race, which was evidently an intrusive one. The inhabitants of the British Islands seem to have been composed of the same two races, and to have spoken the same language as those of GauL

Causes of phonetic change like those which produced the parallel branches of the Teutonic stem (the Germanic and Scandinavian tongues) and of the Windic stem (the Slavonic and Lithuanie tongues) must have existed at an early period in the Celtic language, for the original stem has produced two branches in the British Islands which are wider apart than those of the Teutonic stem, and, according to Zeuss, less widely separated than the two branches of the Windic stem. These branches we shall call, following Zeusa, the Irish and British branches. Each of these branches has again produced three dialects. The Irish or Goidelic dialects are—the Irish proper, the Scottish Gaelic, and the Manx, or dialect of the Irish spoken in the Isle of Man. The British dialects are—the Kymraeg or Welsh, the Cornish, and the Armorie, or language of Brittany. The Cornish is now extinct, having died out about the middle of the last century. We have included Armorie among British dialects on the ground that whatever may be its relation to old Gaulish it was intimately connected during the Middle Ages with the Cornish, if it be not a direct descendant of the language spoken by the southern Britons who emigrated to Brittany during the early Saxon wars.

It would be impossible within the limits of such an article as this to point out even the principal distinctions between the two branches of the Celtic, but the following examples will perhaps enable the reader to realize their general character. The Irish has preserved the hard or k sound of e, while in British it is represented by p,- e.g., Irish cethir, four, eland, posterity, cτann tree, with initial guttural, are equal to the Welsh pedguar, plant, pren ; Irish nach, nech, person, mace, son, with final guttural, and each, each, with initial and final e, correspond respectively with Welsh nep, map, and paup This change from a guttural to a labial, and even in some cases to a dental, is what Professor Curtius calls “labialismus,” and is very marked in Greek as compared with Latin; so that as respects this phonetic law Welsh stands to Irish in the same relation as Greek does to Latin. The tendency to labialism is, however, less in Irish than in Latin, e.g., Latin septem, seven, Irish secht ; and perhaps even than in Sanskrit, for Irish drops initial p, e.g., iasg, fish, Welsh pysg, or changes it into b, e.g., Welsh pen, Irish ben. The reverse process to labialism even sometimes takes place in the case of borrowed words, e.y., Pascha, Easter, Welsh Pasg, Irish Casg; Latin purpura, Irish cor cur. So great is the contrast in this respect between Irish and Welsh, that the latter labializes borrowed names, as in the case of the Irish Saint Ciaran, who became Piaran in Wales. If Dr Windisch, Mr J. Rhys, and some other philologists are right in thinking that the primitive or true p sound when not combined with other consonants has disappeared everywhere from all the Celtic languages, and that when p does appear in them, especially in Welsh, it is only the representative of a former qu, mb, or of a provected b, that is a δ carried forward from the end of one word to the beginning of the next, then the distinction just dwelt upon, though very marked when we compare modern Welsh and Irish, did not exist in ancient times. But whether this be so or not the Irish articulation maintains a good deal of hardness and strength, in illustration of which we may mention that en and sr occur as initial sounds—the latter, which is also found in Sanskrit, does not exist perhaps in any other European language. Again, Irish, like Sanskrit, Latin, German, and Slavonian has preserved the sibilant s, while in British, as in Zend, Persian, and Greek, it has been generally changed into h, e.g., Irish sen, old, Welsh hen, Irish sadann, salt, Welsh halen ; or the s when combine! with other consonants has. a prefixed y, as in Irish searad, separation, Welsh ysear. As regards this change of s into h British also stands to Irish in the same position as Greek does to Latin, e.g., Latin sal, Greek aλς. Like the labialism above pointed out, this change did not, however, constitute an ancient distinction. Irish words can also end in s and r, and in n probably derived from m. Of these, final s disappears first, but we have an example of the preservation of a final r in so common a word as αthir, father, when it has lost the initial labial. British has often v or w for au m in Irish, e.g., louan, a rope, Irish loman ; huvel, low, Irish humai. All the dialects of the British do not do this equally; thus Irish αmail, amal, like, is auel in Cornish, and euel in Armorie, but mal in Welsh. And again the Irish preserves letters where the British loses them; this is especially the case with gutturals, e.g., Irish tech, house, Welsh ti ; Irish noeht, night, Welsh nos ; Irish teglech, household, Welsh teulu. And, lastly, Irish has preserved the declension of its noun even to this day; and forms closely allied to old Indo-European declensions are found in Old Irish, but with the exception of the genitive in Cornish scarcely a trace of declension is to be found in British. Irish verbal forms are also much better preserved than the British ones, though the latter are in a better state than the nouns.

As regards the dialects of each branch, the Irish ones differ less from each other than do the British dialects. Irish proper and Scottish Gaelic are practically the same language, and do not differ greatly more than the dialect of English spoken in the Scotch Lowlands does from common English. Such differences as do exist indicate the modern origin of the Scottish Gaelic. Among those differences the following will bear out this opinion. In the genitive plural the initial consonant is not modified, or, as Irish grammarians say, does not suffer ellipsis in Gaelic as it does in Irish. Thus a Highlander says nan cos, of the feet, where an Irishman would say na g-eοs ; the former would, however, use nam before a labial, as e.g., nαm fear, of the men. Again the possessive pronouns ar, our, bhur, your, do not cause ellipsis in Gaelic as in Irish, e.g., ar buaehaill, our boy, Irish ar m-buaehaill ; bhur eosa, of your feet, Irish bhar g-cosa. Again there is the frequent ending of the nominative plural in Gaelic in an, as in slαtan, rods, a peculiarity which it shares with Manx and Welsh, and probably derives from British; writing the personal ending -αire, or -οir as -air in Gaelic, e.g., sealgair, a huntsman, for seal-gaire, and the personal ending -aidh as -aiehe or -ic!ιe, e.g., eoisiehe for cοisidhe, a footman; writing the Irish termination -ugadh in progressive active nouns as -uehadh, e.g., grαdhαchadh for gradhughadh ; writing the passive participle always hard instead of softening it under certain circumstances, as in Irish, e.g., ta, tha ; te, the. Among the less marked differences we may point out the use of the negative eha in Gaelic for the modern Irish ni and old nocha, the more frequent use of the auxiliary verb, id in conjugation, and the absence of f in the future indicative and in subjunctive in Gaelic. Manx differs from Irish much more than Gaelic; but the dissimilarity is not nearly so great as at first sight it appears to be, owing to a kind of phonetic spelling having been adopted in Manx through which the radical letters have often been lost. Manx has been much corrupted, too, in consequence of the connection between Ireland and the Isle of Man having been cut off by the Norse conquest, and also by its having been under the dominion of Wales for some time; add to which that it never received literary cultivation. The chief differences are in orthography,—the ending of the nominative plural in n already alluded to, the dropping of a final vowel, the substitution of d for g, and of t or c for g in the middle or end of words, <fcc.

Of the British dialects Cornish and Armorie resemble each other more than either of them does Welsh. This resemblance is, however, not as great as that of the Irish and Scottish Gaelic, but perhaps as close as that between Spanish and Portuguese, especially if the later borrowings from English and French be excluded. As to the words borrowed by the Cornish from French, which are much more numerous than those taken from English, it is interesting in connection with the history of romance to note that many are borrowed directly from Provençal. The difference between Welsh and Cornish and Armorie is considerable; Mr Edwin Norris thought it to be as great as that between French and Spanish. Besides the difference in their vocabularies, which is, of course, largely due to the great number of words borrowed by the southern British dialects, especially by Cornish, we may mention the following points in which Cornish differs from Welsh, and these will serve to indicate the general character of the difference between the latter and the southern dialects as a whole :—the retention in Cornish of an initial s combined with other consonants without prefixing y, eg., scol, scod, gpyryt, which in Welsh are weakened to ysgol, ysgwydd, and ysprydd ; the diphthongation of vowels in Welsh in eases where Cornish preserves the strong vowel, eg., Cornish tron, tom, scouth, which are in Welsh trwyn, twym, and ysgwyd ; the better preservation of consonants in the middle of words in Cornish than in Welsh, eg., Cornish hanter, steren, valtοvat, canteuil, which have been reduced in Welsh to hanner, seren, gwallawiad, canyll ; and lastly the preservation in Cornish of a genitive case in complete conformity with the Irish.

The 'question naturally suggests itself here, when did the original Celtic stem divide into the two branches described l and again, when did each of those branches produce their dialects l The late Mr Edwin Norris was of opinion that the separation took place after the arrival of the primitive stock in the British Islands. This opinion appears to be in entire conformity with all the facts of the case, ethnological, linguistic, and historical. We have already indicated that the Scottish Gaelic is an essentially modern dialect, which has an existence of only a few centuries. It is probable that pure Irish was spoken in the Isle of Man in the 6th and 7th centuries, that is, Irish exhibiting no greater dialectic variety than existed at the same period between any two provinces of Ireland itself, so that the Manx dialect must have grown up since then. Of the two branches the Irish is the most archaic, that is it has preserved more of the characteristics of the original stem. Among the British dialects the most archaic, that is, the one which best represents the British branch, is Cornish, which is the descendant of the speech of the un-R,omanized Britons of England. This was also the opinion of Mr Norris, who held that the older the Welsh the more closely would it approximate to Cornish. It is indeed probable that the Welsh dialect originated in the 5th and 6th centuries, when the conquests of the Saxons began to isolate Wales from the other British-speaking people. The separation of Cornish and Armorie is still more recent, a fact which supports the story of the emigration of Britons to Armorica, and of long-continued intercourse during the early Middle Ages.

If the preceding view of the origin of the two branches of Celtic and their respective dialects be correct, it disposes once for all of a very vexed question, namely, did old Gaulish belong to the Irish or to the British type, or, to put it more correctly, to which of those types would the dialects belong which would have grown up in France if Gaulish had not been suppressed by Latin? The usual view has been that the Gaulish belonged to the same type as the British. Grimm’s attempt to prove that the medical incantations contained in the book of Marcellus of Bordeaux, a physician of the 4th century, were Celtic of the Irish type led to a modification of this view. Amédée Thierry assumed that the Gauls proper spoke a dialect of the Irish type, while the Belgae and the Gauls or Galatians of Asia Minor spoke Cymric or British. Such a view implies that Irish and British had already grown out of the original stem before the advent of the Celtic people in the British Islands and Gaul; and further that two distinct waves of Celts had come into Western Europe, the first or oldest being the Goidelic or Irish, and the second the Cymric or British. Edward Lhuyd, the father of Celtic philology, long ago suggested an hypothesis of this kind as an explanation of the occurrence of geographical names in Britain which appeared to him to be Goidelic rather than Cymric. Zeuss threw the weight of his great authority into the scale in favour of the kinship of the old Gaulish and Cymric. The grounds on which he based his opinion have since, however, been altogether explained away, or their force much weakened, especially since the investigations of Gluck and R,oget de Belloguet on the Gaulish vocabulary which has been collected from classic authors and inscriptions, and the increased knowledge of the Celtic dialects, the study of which Zeuss himself so powerfully promoted.

Mediaeval Irish and Welsh manuscripts contain an extensive body of legendary ethnology, which in the case of the Irish legends has been even fitted with a complete chronology. Setting aside the more fabulous parts of the Irish legends which refer to colonists who arrived a short time before and after the deluge, we find four successive colonies mentioned in the following order :— Nemediaιιs, Firbolgs, Tuatha Dé Danann, and Milesians. The Nemedians are said to have occupied the country during only two hundred years, when the greater part of them went away in three separate bodies, owing to the harassing attacks made upon them, and their final overthrow, by a people who appear in Irish legends as sea-rovers, called Fomorians. One body took refuge in Britain, another went to Thrace, and the third into the north of Europe. The Thracian party became the ancestors of the second colonizing race, the Firbolgs. The Nemedians who went to the north of Europe appear afterwards as the Tuatha Dé Danann; those who went into Britain became the Britons. According to this legend three of the early tribes which peopled Ireland were of the same race with the Britons. The fourth and latest of the Irish races, the Milesians, or followers of Miled, are also connected with the others in the genealogies to be found in Irish manuscripts, but the relationship is much more distant than that which is represented to have existed between the other races. All Irish accounts of the early races inhabiting Ireland agree in bringing Miled from the north of Spain; but in the early times when the Irish ethnic stories received their present shape, the majority of people, not alone in Ireland, but everywhere, had very imperfect notions of geography, and often applied the few geographical names which had reached their ears by pure hazard, and generally without having more than the vaguest notions of the places they referred to. A perusal of Irish and, we may add, of Welsh poems and tales will bear out what is here stated. Spain in the Milesian story probably means no more than that the Milesians, whoever they were, came from a distance, and not from neighbouring countries with which the early Irish had intercourse. Ethnic traditions as a rule do not add much to our knowledge, but it is always dangerous to ignore them altogether because they must necessarily contain some truth. Of all the Irish traditions of this class those only seem to possess real importance which relate to the mysterious people called the Tuatha Dé Danann. This name appears to mean the tribes of Dé and Ana; and as Dé is God, and Ana is called the mother of the Irish gods, these supposed invading tribes are only the deities in a system of mythology which has yet to be unravelled.

All these deities descend from a common ancestor, the Alldai, or All-God,...

When the Romans became first acquainted with the Celts there were two Gauls,—Cisalpine Gaul or Northern Italy, and Transalpine or Greater Gaul, which included not only France but also Belgium, all that part of Germany west of the Rhine, and Western Switzerland. Whether any Celtic tribes lived east of the Rhine since the attack of the Gauls on Rome, and whether the frontier of the Germans and Celts was a fixed one within historic times or a constantly advancing one, are questions which we have not space to discuss, nor, if we had, would it be profitable to do so in the absence of any real facts to work upon. To the Continental Celtic ground above defined we have to add the British Islands.

The determination of the limits of the Celtic ground is based chiefly on linguistic evidence. Unfortunately, as regards the Continental part, our materials are scant, and hence a good deal of room is left for the imagination. Thus it has been much discussed whether the language spoken in every part of ancient Gaul was the same. Some have asserted that the Belgians were Germans, and therefore spoke a Teutonic tongue, and that even the Celtic dialect spoken north of the Loire differed considerably from that spoken south of that river in Aquitaine. This opinion was based upon a well-known passage in Caesar’s History of the Gallic War, in which he states that Gaul was divided into three parts which differed among themselves in language, institutions, and laws. This may mean either that three distinct languages were spoken, or if but one language, that there were three well-marked dialects. Μ. Roget de Belloguet has shown from a careful investigation of all ancient authorities, and an analysis of nearly 400 Gaulish words gathered from ancient authors and inscriptions, that the differences in question were dialectic, and that, save, perhaps, in those parts occupied by a Ligurian or Basque people, the same language was spoken in all GauL

Community of language does not, however, necessarily imply community of race. People having no kinship may speak the same language, while others nearly akin may speak widely different languages. This has been found to have been the case in Gaul as elsewhere. One language was spoken by two races which gradually fused into one people—a northern, fair-haired, blue-eyed race, of tall stature, lymphatic temperament, and elongated heads, and a southern race, shorter in stature and dry and nervous in temperament, having brown or black hair and eyes and round heads. The free or dominant class of Gauls belonged to the former race, which was evidently an intrusive one. The inhabitants of the British Islands seem to have been composed of the same two races, and to have spoken the same language as those of GauL

Causes of phonetic change like those which produced the parallel branches of the Teutonic stem (the Germanic and Scandinavian tongues) and of the Windic stem (the Slavonic and Lithuanie tongues) must have existed at an early period in the Celtic language, for the original stem has produced two branches in the British Islands which are wider apart than those of the Teutonic stem, and, according to Zeuss, less widely separated than the two branches of the Windic stem. These branches we shall call, following Zeusa, the Irish and British branches. Each of these branches has again produced three dialects. The Irish or Goidelic dialects are—the Irish proper, the Scottish Gaelic, and the Manx, or dialect of the Irish spoken in the Isle of Man. The British dialects are—the Kymraeg or Welsh, the Cornish, and the Armorie, or language of Brittany. The Cornish is now extinct, having died out about the middle of the last century. We have included Armorie among British dialects on the ground that whatever may be its relation to old Gaulish it was intimately connected during the Middle Ages with the Cornish, if it be not a direct descendant of the language spoken by the southern Britons who emigrated to Brittany during the early Saxon wars.

It would be impossible within the limits of such an article as this to point out even the principal distinctions between the two branches of the Celtic, but the following examples will perhaps enable the reader to realize their general character. The Irish has preserved the hard or k sound of e, while in British it is represented by p,- e.g., Irish cethir, four, eland, posterity, cτann tree, with initial guttural, are equal to the Welsh pedguar, plant, pren ; Irish nach, nech, person, mace, son, with final guttural, and each, each, with initial and final e, correspond respectively with Welsh nep, map, and paup This change from a guttural to a labial, and even in some cases to a dental, is what Professor Curtius calls “labialismus,” and is very marked in Greek as compared with Latin; so that as respects this phonetic law Welsh stands to Irish in the same relation as Greek does to Latin. The tendency to labialism is, however, less in Irish than in Latin, e.g., Latin septem, seven, Irish secht ; and perhaps even than in Sanskrit, for Irish drops initial p, e.g., iasg, fish, Welsh pysg, or changes it into b, e.g., Welsh pen, Irish ben. The reverse process to labialism even sometimes takes place in the case of borrowed words, e.y., Pascha, Easter, Welsh Pasg, Irish Casg; Latin purpura, Irish cor cur. So great is the contrast in this respect between Irish and Welsh, that the latter labializes borrowed names, as in the case of the Irish Saint Ciaran, who became Piaran in Wales. If Dr Windisch, Mr J. Rhys, and some other philologists are right in thinking that the primitive or true p sound when not combined with other consonants has disappeared everywhere from all the Celtic languages, and that when p does appear in them, especially in Welsh, it is only the representative of a former qu, mb, or of a provected b, that is a δ carried forward from the end of one word to the beginning of the next, then the distinction just dwelt upon, though very marked when we compare modern Welsh and Irish, did not exist in ancient times. But whether this be so or not the Irish articulation maintains a good deal of hardness and strength, in illustration of which we may mention that en and sr occur as initial sounds—the latter, which is also found in Sanskrit, does not exist perhaps in any other European language. Again, Irish, like Sanskrit, Latin, German, and Slavonian has preserved the sibilant s, while in British, as in Zend, Persian, and Greek, it has been generally changed into h, e.g., Irish sen, old, Welsh hen, Irish sadann, salt, Welsh halen ; or the s when combine! with other consonants has. a prefixed y, as in Irish searad, separation, Welsh ysear. As regards this change of s into h British also stands to Irish in the same position as Greek does to Latin, e.g., Latin sal, Greek aλς. Like the labialism above pointed out, this change did not, however, constitute an ancient distinction. Irish words can also end in s and r, and in n probably derived from m. Of these, final s disappears first, but we have an example of the preservation of a final r in so common a word as αthir, father, when it has lost the initial labial. British has often v or w for au m in Irish, e.g., louan, a rope, Irish loman ; huvel, low, Irish humai. All the dialects of the British do not do this equally; thus Irish αmail, amal, like, is auel in Cornish, and euel in Armorie, but mal in Welsh. And again the Irish preserves letters where the British loses them; this is especially the case with gutturals, e.g., Irish tech, house, Welsh ti ; Irish noeht, night, Welsh nos ; Irish teglech, household, Welsh teulu. And, lastly, Irish has preserved the declension of its noun even to this day; and forms closely allied to old Indo-European declensions are found in Old Irish, but with the exception of the genitive in Cornish scarcely a trace of declension is to be found in British. Irish verbal forms are also much better preserved than the British ones, though the latter are in a better state than the nouns.

As regards the dialects of each branch, the Irish ones differ less from each other than do the British dialects. Irish proper and Scottish Gaelic are practically the same language, and do not differ greatly more than the dialect of English spoken in the Scotch Lowlands does from common English. Such differences as do exist indicate the modern origin of the Scottish Gaelic. Among those differences the following will bear out this opinion. In the genitive plural the initial consonant is not modified, or, as Irish grammarians say, does not suffer ellipsis in Gaelic as it does in Irish. Thus a Highlander says nan cos, of the feet, where an Irishman would say na g-eοs ; the former would, however, use nam before a labial, as e.g., nαm fear, of the men. Again the possessive pronouns ar, our, bhur, your, do not cause ellipsis in Gaelic as in Irish, e.g., ar buaehaill, our boy, Irish ar m-buaehaill ; bhur eosa, of your feet, Irish bhar g-cosa. Again there is the frequent ending of the nominative plural in Gaelic in an, as in slαtan, rods, a peculiarity which it shares with Manx and Welsh, and probably derives from British; writing the personal ending -αire, or -οir as -air in Gaelic, e.g., sealgair, a huntsman, for seal-gaire, and the personal ending -aidh as -aiehe or -ic!ιe, e.g., eoisiehe for cοisidhe, a footman; writing the Irish termination -ugadh in progressive active nouns as -uehadh, e.g., grαdhαchadh for gradhughadh ; writing the passive participle always hard instead of softening it under certain circumstances, as in Irish, e.g., ta, tha ; te, the. Among the less marked differences we may point out the use of the negative eha in Gaelic for the modern Irish ni and old nocha, the more frequent use of the auxiliary verb, id in conjugation, and the absence of f in the future indicative and in subjunctive in Gaelic. Manx differs from Irish much more than Gaelic; but the dissimilarity is not nearly so great as at first sight it appears to be, owing to a kind of phonetic spelling having been adopted in Manx through which the radical letters have often been lost. Manx has been much corrupted, too, in consequence of the connection between Ireland and the Isle of Man having been cut off by the Norse conquest, and also by its having been under the dominion of Wales for some time; add to which that it never received literary cultivation. The chief differences are in orthography,—the ending of the nominative plural in n already alluded to, the dropping of a final vowel, the substitution of d for g, and of t or c for g in the middle or end of words, <fcc.

Of the British dialects Cornish and Armorie resemble each other more than either of them does Welsh. This resemblance is, however, not as great as that of the Irish and Scottish Gaelic, but perhaps as close as that between Spanish and Portuguese, especially if the later borrowings from English and French be excluded. As to the words borrowed by the Cornish from French, which are much more numerous than those taken from English, it is interesting in connection with the history of romance to note that many are borrowed directly from Provençal. The difference between Welsh and Cornish and Armorie is considerable; Mr Edwin Norris thought it to be as great as that between French and Spanish. Besides the difference in their vocabularies, which is, of course, largely due to the great number of words borrowed by the southern British dialects, especially by Cornish, we may mention the following points in which Cornish differs from Welsh, and these will serve to indicate the general character of the difference between the latter and the southern dialects as a whole :—the retention in Cornish of an initial s combined with other consonants without prefixing y, eg., scol, scod, gpyryt, which in Welsh are weakened to ysgol, ysgwydd, and ysprydd ; the diphthongation of vowels in Welsh in eases where Cornish preserves the strong vowel, eg., Cornish tron, tom, scouth, which are in Welsh trwyn, twym, and ysgwyd ; the better preservation of consonants in the middle of words in Cornish than in Welsh, eg., Cornish hanter, steren, valtοvat, canteuil, which have been reduced in Welsh to hanner, seren, gwallawiad, canyll ; and lastly the preservation in Cornish of a genitive case in complete conformity with the Irish.

The 'question naturally suggests itself here, when did the original Celtic stem divide into the two branches described l and again, when did each of those branches produce their dialects l The late Mr Edwin Norris was of opinion that the separation took place after the arrival of the primitive stock in the British Islands. This opinion appears to be in entire conformity with all the facts of the case, ethnological, linguistic, and historical. We have already indicated that the Scottish Gaelic is an essentially modern dialect, which has an existence of only a few centuries. It is probable that pure Irish was spoken in the Isle of Man in the 6th and 7th centuries, that is, Irish exhibiting no greater dialectic variety than existed at the same period between any two provinces of Ireland itself, so that the Manx dialect must have grown up since then. Of the two branches the Irish is the most archaic, that is it has preserved more of the characteristics of the original stem. Among the British dialects the most archaic, that is, the one which best represents the British branch, is Cornish, which is the descendant of the speech of the un-R,omanized Britons of England. This was also the opinion of Mr Norris, who held that the older the Welsh the more closely would it approximate to Cornish. It is indeed probable that the Welsh dialect originated in the 5th and 6th centuries, when the conquests of the Saxons began to isolate Wales from the other British-speaking people. The separation of Cornish and Armorie is still more recent, a fact which supports the story of the emigration of Britons to Armorica, and of long-continued intercourse during the early Middle Ages.

If the preceding view of the origin of the two branches of Celtic and their respective dialects be correct, it disposes once for all of a very vexed question, namely, did old Gaulish belong to the Irish or to the British type, or, to put it more correctly, to which of those types would the dialects belong which would have grown up in France if Gaulish had not been suppressed by Latin? The usual view has been that the Gaulish belonged to the same type as the British. Grimm’s attempt to prove that the medical incantations contained in the book of Marcellus of Bordeaux, a physician of the 4th century, were Celtic of the Irish type led to a modification of this view. Amédée Thierry assumed that the Gauls proper spoke a dialect of the Irish type, while the Belgae and the Gauls or Galatians of Asia Minor spoke Cymric or British. Such a view implies that Irish and British had already grown out of the original stem before the advent of the Celtic people in the British Islands and Gaul; and further that two distinct waves of Celts had come into Western Europe, the first or oldest being the Goidelic or Irish, and the second the Cymric or British. Edward Lhuyd, the father of Celtic philology, long ago suggested an hypothesis of this kind as an explanation of the occurrence of geographical names in Britain which appeared to him to be Goidelic rather than Cymric. Zeuss threw the weight of his great authority into the scale in favour of the kinship of the old Gaulish and Cymric. The grounds on which he based his opinion have since, however, been altogether explained away, or their force much weakened, especially since the investigations of Gluck and R,oget de Belloguet on the Gaulish vocabulary which has been collected from classic authors and inscriptions, and the increased knowledge of the Celtic dialects, the study of which Zeuss himself so powerfully promoted.

Mediaeval Irish and Welsh manuscripts contain an extensive body of legendary ethnology, which in the case of the Irish legends has been even fitted with a complete chronology. Setting aside the more fabulous parts of the Irish legends which refer to colonists who arrived a short time before and after the deluge, we find four successive colonies mentioned in the following order :— Nemediaιιs, Firbolgs, Tuatha Dé Danann, and Milesians. The Nemedians are said to have occupied the country during only two hundred years, when the greater part of them went away in three separate bodies, owing to the harassing attacks made upon them, and their final overthrow, by a people who appear in Irish legends as sea-rovers, called Fomorians. One body took refuge in Britain, another went to Thrace, and the third into the north of Europe. The Thracian party became the ancestors of the second colonizing race, the Firbolgs. The Nemedians who went to the north of Europe appear afterwards as the Tuatha Dé Danann; those who went into Britain became the Britons. According to this legend three of the early tribes which peopled Ireland were of the same race with the Britons. The fourth and latest of the Irish races, the Milesians, or followers of Miled, are also connected with the others in the genealogies to be found in Irish manuscripts, but the relationship is much more distant than that which is represented to have existed between the other races. All Irish accounts of the early races inhabiting Ireland agree in bringing Miled from the north of Spain; but in the early times when the Irish ethnic stories received their present shape, the majority of people, not alone in Ireland, but everywhere, had very imperfect notions of geography, and often applied the few geographical names which had reached their ears by pure hazard, and generally without having more than the vaguest notions of the places they referred to. A perusal of Irish and, we may add, of Welsh poems and tales will bear out what is here stated. Spain in the Milesian story probably means no more than that the Milesians, whoever they were, came from a distance, and not from neighbouring countries with which the early Irish had intercourse. Ethnic traditions as a rule do not add much to our knowledge, but it is always dangerous to ignore them altogether because they must necessarily contain some truth. Of all the Irish traditions of this class those only seem to possess real importance which relate to the mysterious people called the Tuatha Dé Danann. This name appears to mean the tribes of Dé and Ana; and as Dé is God, and Ana is called the mother of the Irish gods, these supposed invading tribes are only the deities in a system of mythology which has yet to be unravelled.

All these deities descend from a common ancestor, the Alldai, or All-God,...