Page:Essays ethnological and linguistic.djvu/53

Rh the Scilly islands bear their name to this day, as the Silures did in the time of Tacitus. This name was very extensively spread over the South of Europe generally as well as in Spain, and the island of Sicily was also named from them. They appear then to have been a tribe of Gaelic origin, settling finally in England.

Besides the Silures there was another great nation in the West of England known as the Brigantes. This people had also settled in Ireland having been previously settled in the South of France and the North of Spain. The province of Gallicia in Spain which in its very name bespeaks its former Gallic occupation, has to this day the denomination of Brigantina, and the Galliego dialect as it is called in Spain gives decided indications of its original Gaelic character. The physical appearance and manners of the people, the use of the bagpipe and the retention of many words unknown to the Latin, Spanish or any other language than the Gaelic afford the most conclusive proofs of this assertion.

It has been supposed by William von Humboldt and other writers that the singular people now known to us as the Basques were the original inhabitants of Spain, and that they were driven to their present mountain homes on the Pyrenees by the Celts. They suppose also that they are the descendants of the people named by many ancient writers Iberi as if distinct from the Celts. But if those maintaining this opinion had examined carefully the statements of the ancient writers, they would have observed that the various names of Celts, Gauls and Iberi or Celtiberi were applied indiscriminately to the same people. The title Celts or Gauls being given them generally by the Romans, and the name Iberi by the Greek writers who had as it appears to me taken it from the Phœnicians, in whose language, judging from its analogy with the Hebrew, it signified a wandering people.

But whether this theory of William von Humboldt's be correct or not, it is clear from every relic left us by the Greek and Roman writers who wrote after Spain had been subjugated by the Romans, that it was then inhabited by Celtic tribes whether Cymric or Gaelic. I believe that without exception every word handed down to us from antiquity as Spanish, appertain, to either Cymric or Gaelic and not to the Basque, which has no affinity whatever to either of the others, consequently that at the time of the Roman domination at least Spain was essentially Celtic, and judging from the evidences yet remaining in the Spanish language I conclude more particularly Gaelic.

From these considerations my full conclusion is that the