indigenous population and reduced them to the state of serfs or slaves, would, as a mere matter of convenience, catch as well as they could, and retain in use, the names of existing objects round them. When they made a new enclosure or erected a fortress of their own, however, they would take the elements of the new name, not from the original language of the land, but from their own tongue. So it was with the Saxons and the Celts in England, and with the Spaniards and the Mexicans in the New World.

Again, when a body of civilised persons, who have already felt the advantage of an established nomenclature, emigrate to a new country, the first want they feel is that of established proper names for the place where they live, and the objects which surround them. No man that we know of ever invented a new and arbitrary combination of sounds or letters, and applied these syllables to supply this urgent need. With civilised settlers the simple designation of water, hill, and rock, which satisfied the savage cooped up by forests, and separated from other tribes, is insufficient. But civilisation does not help them much, and the poverty of human invention has subjected our brethren in America to ambiguities and inconveniences without end, in connection with their local nomenclature.

A few years ago a distinguished member of the House of Commons, who was born in the Colonies, made a speech, in which he inveighed against the treatment of her dependencies by the mother country. Among other grievances he stated that a Governor in Canada had once named four townships after his wife's four lapdogs. We believe that the assertion was founded in truth, and that the townships of 'Flos' and 'Tiny' (we forget the other two) still remain among the local divisions of that great colony. It would be well if no greater wrong had ever been inflicted on a colony by its governor. At any rate, we are sure that these canine appellations are better calculated to serve the purpose for which they were intended, than the senseless repetitions of names of places identical with those in the Old World. A map of America exhibits the straits to which men have been reduced in this department of language.

Thus, in the Compendium of the Census of the United States for 1850, we have no less than thirteen Romes and thirteen Rochesters. Sparta appears nine times; Troy no less than twenty-five times. There are only two or three Londons,' but many more Londonderrys; and there are twenty-two Dovers.' Another resource has been to call the town or district after some distinguished man. The name of Washington may well be said to live in the mouths of his countrymen, and on the backs

of their letters also, when we find it applied as a local name no less than 138 times. If Jackson, and Brown, and Smith are troublesome to the Post-office as the names of individual men, the confusion must be greatly increased when we find about 130 places called after the first, no less than nineteen after the second, and ten after the third. Patriotism and public virtue are, however, in America repaid by multiplying a man's name. It answers the purposes of an order of merit. Nor do the heroes of antiquity escape. There are two or three' Solons;' half-a-dozen 'Scipios;' at least one 'Cato,' and a couple of 'Ciceros.'

About fifty places or townships are named simply 'Centre;' between sixty and seventy bear the name of Liberty;' and nearly 120 that of Union;' but the number of these last may perhaps now be diminished. All this is referred to only for the purpose of showing how difficult it has been found to give a proper name. Nor was the task easier in former times with reference to men than it now is with reference to places.

In their zeal to civilise Ireland our ancestors got an Act of the Irish Parliament passed in the fifth year of Edward IV. (cap. 3), entitled 'An Act that the Irishmen dwelling in the counties of Dublin, Meath, Uriel, and Kildare shall go apparelled like Englishmen, and wear their beards after the English manner, swear allegiance, and take English surnames.' Each such Irishman was to take to him an English surname of one town, as Sutton, Chester, Trim, Skrym, Cork, Kinsale; or colour, as white, blacke, browne; or art or science, as smith, or carpenter; or office, as cooke, butler; and that he and his issue shall use the name under pain of forfeyting of his goods yearly till the premisses be done.'

We have heard of the difficulty being met in a different way

* There is something very striking in the application of proper names to the famous weapons of the chiefs in the Northern Sagas and the old romances. The custom shows the rarity and the value of good arms, and the personal affection, as it were, which their wearers had for them. They were not mere chattels, but beings half-instinct with life and consciousness of their own. Such was Skarphedin's bill Rimmugygr' or 'the ogress of war,' in the Njal's Saga, which gave forth a sort of thrill or hum of joy when bloodshed was impending. Tegner, in his beautiful Swedish poem of Frithiof,' describes the hero's sword Angurwadel,' with its engraved Runes that grew bright and burning on the eve of battle. In the Laxdæla Saga we have Germundr's sword 'Fotbitr,' or 'the Footbiter;' and in the Morte d'Arthur, the good sword Excalibur.' The names of ships are indispensable for the purpose of identifying them, and the sailor feels the same sort of sentiment for the name of his favourite vessel as for the name of his mistress. Celebrated jewels, too (like the Koh-i-Noor), acquire a sort of personality and a proper name in the same way. Names are given to horses and dogs, partly as a matter of convenience, and partly because affection is felt for them. We think that the use of a proper name for an animal re-acts on the owner's mind, and by constantly recalling the individual horse or dog by a term of endearment, has a direct tendency to increase the regard already felt, or the value set on its usefulness.

in

in one of the West India islands, where the whole liberated cargo of a captured slave-ship were turned to account by enlisting them in a negro regiment then being formed. The unfortunate slaves spoke twenty different languages; very few of them understood one another, and none understood the language of their new masters. How were they to be named? Recourse was had to the Army List as the only repertory of names which was readily accessible, and the negroes were taught to answer to the roll-call accordingly; beginning with 'Duke o' York'-'Sir David Dundas and so on, in succession.

But we must not be led away by the wider subject of proper names in general, and we return to the volume before us. Our author remarks very truly that such names as Tadmor, or Sidon, or Hamath, appear to be endowed with an inherent and indestructible vitality: they outlive dynasties and empires, and stand as remnants of an earlier world. Other names tell us the story of a race, or are strewed over the soil, as marks of a wave which once swept across it and has now disappeared. Let us take, for instance, Spain as an example of the record afforded by names of places and natural objects.

In a corner of Europe, on the spurs of one of the great mountain-ranges-hemmed in among narrow valleys-and driven back, as it were, to the very surf of the great Western Ocean, there still live the remnants of a singular people. If they are allied to any other European race, it must be to the Lapps or Finns, but we think that doubtful. Their tongue is a peculiar one; and though their whole number is probably not more than threequarters of a million, they speak three principal dialects.*

William von Humboldt has shown from a comparison of the names of places throughout the Spanish peninsula, that the ancient Iberians were identical in race and language with these Basques; and that this people once occupied the whole Spanish peninsula. He has found traces of them in the large islands of the Mediterranean and even in Italy. The first wave, therefore, of population which we can trace in Spain, is that of the race who call themselves Euscaldunac, and their language Euscara †-words meaning

* Dr. Arnold, History of Rome,' Vol. i., p. 488, note, says: The Iberians, in Humboldt's judgment, were a people quite distinct from the Kelts; but they may have had the same degree of connection with them which subsisted between all the nations of the great Indo-Germanic family.'

It is very curious that Livy applies the adjective Oscensis (Oscense Argentum), as if it meant 'Spanish,' and was derived from the national name given in the text. There was, no doubt, a town called Osca, but it is improbable, both from its position and its relative insignificance, that its name should have attached to the large sums brought to Rome. See Livy, xxxiv. 10, 46; xl. 43. The words seem, therefore, to have meant coined Spanish silver. Compare ‘Prüfung über die Urbewohner Hispaniens,' s. 57.

'the

'the Speakers' and 'Speech,' as contrasted with those around them, whose language was unintelligible.

We will venture to translate a passage from Humboldt which exhibits his conclusions. He says:—

Two propositions seem to me to be established by what has been stated. The ancient Iberians were the stock of the modern Basques; these Iberians were spread over the whole peninsula, constituted one nation, and spoke one and the same language with dialectic varieties. The Basque language was therefore the only one belonging to the race whose first immigration into the country, if they were not indigenous to the soil, took place before any tradition which has reached us. We must now see with what foreign nations these Iberians were mixed, for the names of places lead us to infer the presence of others besides the Basques. Phoenicians, Greeks, and Carthaginians settled themselves on the coasts in very early times, and penetrated more or less deeply into the country. Pliny mentions the Persians also on the authority of Varro, but no notice of their expeditions to Spain occurs elsewhere. The Romans extirpated the native manners and language, and turned a great part of the peninsula into a province completely resembling Italy. All these immigrations, however, I pass over, and dwell only on the foreign races which as Barbarians in the sense of the Ancients, and belonging to Western Europe, were settled in Spain. These were only the Celts, and they appear in the classic writers in a twofold form as pure Celts on the Anas (the Guadiana), or as a people closely related to them in the north-western corner, which is now called Galicia; * and again as a race compounded of Celts and Iberians, under the name of Celtiberi.'-p. 137.

Thus this complicated story of successive occupations by different races of the Spanish peninsula is told to us partly by History, but still more clearly by the names which they have left adhering to the soil. There is spread over the whole surface a stratum of Iberian names in which elements prevail, such as 'asta' (a rock) and 'ura' (water), having a meaning in the Basque and in no other known tongue. The terminations moreover and the formation of the words are in accordance with the system of sounds belonging to that language. Then overlying these, or side by side with them, we have the 'Douro,' and the deposit of Celtic appellations, including probably the much disputed termination briga.' Escalona, possibly identical with Ascalon,' and Medina Sidonia, with its Arabic prefix of City,' carry us back to the settlements of Tyre; while Carthagena' and 'Carteia' tell of the trading settlements of Carthage.

6

The Roman civilisation has left its traces in such names, among others, as Merida (Augusta Emerita), and the singular

*Strabo, iii., c. 3.

transformations

transformations of 'Pax Augusta' into 'Badajoz,' and 'Cæsarea Augusta' into 'Saragossa.'

The incursion of the Franks in the time of Gallienus, when they destroyed Tarragona, was a mere raid for the purpose of plunder. The invasions by the Suevi, Alani, and Vandals, in the year 409, and the subsequent advance of the Goths, led in the first instance to bloody wars among the barbarians themselves. But it is singular that the occupation of Spain by the Visigoths has not apparently left much trace in the proper names of the country.

If we follow the subsequent history, we may see in Mr. Taylor's little map (p. 111) the manner in which the Arabic names are studded over the whole of Spain south of the line of the Douro, and on the east coast up beyond Saragossa. The Rock of Gibraltar, where Tarik passed the straits, still stands as the monument of his conquest. It is remarkable that so many natural objects in that country, such as rivers, bear names compounded with wadi' or 'guada' (the channel of a stream), like Guadalquivir, Guadalimar, Guadarama, and Guadalete, and derived from a conquest so late as that of the Arabs; whereas in England, the Cymric or Welsh names of streams have retained their ground through all the vicissitudes of Saxon, Danish, and Norman conquest.

We

It is by no means easy to account for this difference. In some cases, no doubt, as in that of the Guadiana,' the Arabic element was, by a process which we shall see repeated in England, added to the original name; but there are probably at least thirty such river-names, and in most of these (as in Guadalquivir'), the whole name is that given by the later race. do not believe that this can be explained by the supposition that the Moors extirpated the original peasantry, or swept them off the face of the soil to be employed only as slaves, kept in 'ergastula,' and sent out to work. On the contrary, it would appear from Condé (v. i. p. 75), that they merely imposed on them a higher tax than they did on the Mahometans, just as the Turks taxed the Greek Rayahs.

We have thus briefly referred to the instance of Spain as an illustration of the manner in which the local names of a country tell a most curious tale of the races and the nations which have occupied its soil, or passed over its surface. The Basques now stand isolated like a solitary boulder of some great and ancient rockformation of which the mass has been destroyed and swept away. The Phoenicians and the Carthaginians have perished long ago. The power of Rome and her Colonies has disappeared and the Arab host, first cooped up within the narrow limits of Granada,

was