Page:Essays ethnological and linguistic.djvu/51

Rh a people of a different nationality, whose origin we have in like manner to investigate.

That there was a people inhabiting Wales and the Western parts of England previous to the Cymri, is a fact which all Welsh scholars both of present and past times acknowledge, though they have been much perplexed how to account for it. They find proofs on every side of there having been a Gaelic people, and thus they conclude, though against their own traditions which I have transcribed, that these Gael were the first inhabitants of the island and had gone on to Ireland. The greatest of the Welsh Antiquarians the learned Edw. Lhuyd recognized the fact and suggested this supposition to account for it 150 years since. Rowland and other eminent Welsh scholars have in one continued series assented to it, and one of the most recent and most interesting works on Welsh antiquities "Vestiges of the Gael in Gwynedd or Wales," by the Rev. Basil Jones has carried out the subject in a very conclusive manner.

These acknowledgements all arise from their observing in their country names of places and objects which are not Cymric but unmistakeably Gaelic. They might have come to the same conclusion from another consideration, if they had studied Ethnology, namely from the many words in their language which are evidently of foreign and Gaelic origin. This circumstance occurring in any language is a decided proof of some considerable amalgamation having at some anterior period taken place between the two people, and in their case it must have taken place when being themselves driven upon Wales, they found there a small remnant of the Gael who had escaped also from Roman domination.

But not only do the modern Cymri find those names there now, but the scholar also finds them still more remarkably in the writers of the Roman conquest. One word especially has arrested the attention of every writer on the subject, Isca, as applied to a river or body of water throughout the West of England, Isca Silurum, Isca Dumnoniorum and others. This word is not known in Cymric, but it is the common term as uisge for water in the Gaelic of Scotland and Ireland. As we find compounds of Dwr in the East of England where it is not intelligible except through the medium of the Cymric, so in the West we have the word Isca constantly recurring, which is only intelligible trough the medium of the Gaelic. Even in our days the rivers bear only corrupt forms of the old word, whether known as Esk, Usk Axe, Exe, or even Ouse or Isis into which it has been euphonized.