Both in small and great things, philology, dealing with Celtic
matters, has exemplified this tending of science towards unity. Who
has not been puzzled by the relation of the Scots with Ireland--that
vetus et major Scotia, as Colgan calls it? Who does not feel what
pleasure Zeuss brings us when he suggests that Gael, the name for the
Irish Celt, and Scot, are at bottom the same word, both having their
origin in a word meaning wind, and both signifying the violent stormy
people? {68} Who does not feel his mind agreeably cleared about our
friends the Fenians, when he learns that the root of their name, fen,
'white,' appears in the hero Fingal; in Gwynned, the Welsh name for
North Wales in the Roman Venedotia; in Vannes in Brittany; in Venice?
The very name of Ireland, some say, comes from the famous Sanscrit
word Arya, the land of the Aryans, or noble men; although the weight
of opinion seems to be in favour of connecting it rather with another
Sanscrit word, avara, occidental, the western land or isle of the
west. {69} But, at any rate, who that has been brought up to think
the Celts utter aliens from us and our culture, can come without a
start of sympathy upon such words as heol (sol), or buaist (fuisti)?
or upon such a sentence as this, 'Peris Duw dui funnaun' ('God
prepared two fountains')? Or when Mr. Whitley Stokes, one of the
very ablest scholars formed in Zeuss's school, a born philologist,--
he now occupies, alas! a post under the Government of India, instead
of a chair of philology at home, and makes one think mournfully of
Montesquieu's saying, that had he been an Englishman he should never
have produced his great work, but have caught the contagion of
practical life, and devoted himself to what is called 'rising in the
world,' when Mr. Whitley Stokes, in his edition of Cormac's Glossary,
holds up the Irish word traith, the sea, and makes us remark that,
though the names Triton, Amphitrite, and those of corresponding
Indian and Zend divinities, point to the meaning sea, yet it is only