The reason of this misconception was, that their records lay wholly uninvestigated as far as all historical study of the language was concerned, and that nobody troubled himself about the relative age and the development of forms, so that the philologists were fain to take them as they were put into their hands by uncritical or perverse native commentators and writers, whose grammars and dictionaries teemed with blunders and downright forgeries.  One thing, and one thing alone, led to the truth:  the sheer drudgery of thirteen long years spent by Zeuss in the patient investigation of the most ancient Celtic records, in their actual condition, line by line and letter by letter.  Then for the first time the foundation of Celtic research was laid; but the great philologist did not live to see the superstructure which never could have been raised but for him.  Prichard was first to indicate the right path, and Bopp, in his monograph of 1839, displayed his incomparable and masterly sagacity as usual, but for want of any trustworthy record of Celtic words and forms to work upon, the truth remained concealed or obscured until the publication of the Gramatica Celtica.  Dr. Arnold, a man of the past generation, who made more use of the then uncertain and unfixed doctrines of comparative philology in his historical writings than is done by the present generation in the fullest noonday light of the Vergleichende Grammatik, was thus justified in his view by the philology of the period, to which he merely gave an enlarged historical expression.  The prime fallacy then as now, however, was that of antedating the distinction between Gaelic and Cymric Celts.’

{25} Dr. O’Conor in his Catalogue of the Stowe MSS. (quoted by O’Curry).

{26} O’Curry.

{29} Here, where Saturday should come, something is wanting in the manuscript.

{66} See Les Scythes, les Ancetres des Peuples Germaniques et Slaves, par F. G. Bergmann, professeur a la faculte des Lettres de Strasbourg:  Colmar, 1858.  But Professor Bergmann’s etymologies are often, says Lord Strangford, ’false lights, held by an uncertain hand.’  And Lord Strangford continues:  —­’The Apian land certainly meant the watery land, Meer-Umschlungon, among the pre-Hellenic Greeks, just as the same land is called Morea by the modern post-Hellenic or Romaic Greeks from more, the name for the sea in the Slavonic vernacular of its inhabitants during the heart of the middle ages.  But it is only connected by a remote and secondary affinity, if connected at all, with the avia of Scandinavia, assuming that to be the true German word for water, which, if it had come down to us in Gothic, would have been avi, genitive aujos, and not a mere Latinised termination.  Scythian is surely a negative rather than a positive term, much like our Indian, or the Turanian of modern ethnologists, used to comprehend nomads and barbarians of all sorts and races north and east of the Black and Caspian seas.