Cymric group of languages:  our earliest Cornish document is a vocabulary of the thirteenth century; our earliest Breton document is a short description of an estate in a deed of the ninth century; our earliest Welsh documents are Welsh glosses of the eighth century to Eutychus, the grammarian, and Ovid’s Art of Love, and the verses found by Edward Lhuyd in the Juvencus manuscript at Cambridge.  The mention of this Juvencus fragment, by-the-by, suggests the difference there is between an interested and a disinterested critical habit.  Mr. Nash deals with this fragment; but, in spite of all his great acuteness and learning, because he has a bias, because he does not bring to these matters the disinterested spirit they need, he is capable of getting rid, quite unwarrantably, of a particular word in the fragment which does not suit him; his dealing with the verses is an advocate’s dealing, not a critic’s.  Of this sort of thing Zeuss is incapable.

The test which Zeuss used for establishing the age of these documents is a scientific test, the test of orthography and of declensional and syntactical forms.  These matters are far out of my province, but what is clear, sound, and simple, has a natural attraction for us all, and one feels a pleasure in repeating it.  It is the grand sign of age, Zeuss says, in Welsh and Irish words, when what the grammarians call the ‘destitutio tenuium’ has not yet taken place; when the sharp consonants have not yet been changed into flat, P or t into B or D; when, for instance, map, a son, has not yet become mab; coet a wood, coed; ocet, a harrow, oged.  This is a clear, scientific test to apply, and a test of which the accuracy can be verified; I do not say that Zeuss was the first person who knew this test or applied it, but I say that he is the first person who in dealing with Celtic matters has invariably proceeded by means of this and similar scientific tests; the first person, therefore, the body of whose work has a scientific, stable character; and so he stands as a model to all Celtic inquirers.

His influence has already been most happy; and as I have enlarged on a certain failure in criticism of Eugene O’Curry’s,—­whose business, after all, was the description and classification of materials rather than criticism,—­let me show, by another example from Eugene O’Curry, this good influence of Zeuss upon Celtic studies.  Eugene O’Curry wants to establish that compositions of an older date than the twelfth century existed in Ireland in the twelfth century, and thus he proceeds.  He takes one of the great extant Irish manuscripts, the Leabhar na h’Uidhre; or, Book of the Dun Cow.  The compiler of this book was, he says, a certain Maelmuiri, a member of the religious house of Cluainmacnois.  This he establishes from a passage in the manuscript itself:  ’This is a trial of his pen here, by Maelmuiri, son of the son of Conn na m’Bocht.’  The date of Maelmuiri he establishes from a passage in the