It is unsafe to connect their name with anything as yet; it is quite as likely that it refers to the bow and arrow as to the shield, and is connected with our word to shoot, sceotan, skiutan, Lithuanian szau-ti.  Some of the Scythian peoples may have been Anarian, Allophylic, Mongolian; some were demonstrably Aryan, and not only that, but Iranian as well, as is best shown in a memoir read before the Berlin Academy this last year; the evidence having been first indicated in the rough by Schaffarik the Slavonic antiquary.  Coins, glosses, proper names, and inscriptions prove it.  Targitaos (not -tavus) and the rest is guess-work or wrong.  Herodotus’s [Greek] for the goddess Vesta is not connected with the root div whence Devas, Deus, &c., but the root tap, in Latin tep (of tepere, tepefacere), Slavonic tepl, topl (for tep or top), in modern Persian tab.  Thymele refers to the hearth as the place of smoke ([Greek], thus, fumus), but familia denotes household from famulus for fagmulus, the root fag being equated with the Sansk. bhaj, servira.  Lucan’s Hesus or Esus may fairly be compared with the Welsh Hu Gadarn by legitimate process, but no letter-change can justify his connection with Gaisos, the spear, not the sword, Virgil’s gaesum, A. S. gar, our verb to gore, retained in its outer form in gar-fish.  For Theuthisks lege Thiudisks, from thiuda, populus; in old high German Diutisk, Diotisk, popularis, vulgaris, the country vernacular as distinguished from the cultivated Latin; hence the word Dutch, Deutsch.  With our ancestors theod stood for nation generally and getheode for any speech.  Our diet in the political sense is the same word, but borrowed from our German cousins, not inherited from our fathers.  The modern Celtic form is the Irish tuath, in ancient Celtic it must have been teuta, touta, of which we actually have the adjective toutius in the Gaulish inscription of Nismes.  In Oscan we have it as turta, tuta, its adjective being handed down in Livy’s meddix tuticus, the mayor or chief magistrate of the tuta.  In the Umbrian inscriptions it is tota.  In Lithuanian tauta, the country opposed to the town, and in old Prussian tauta, the country generally, en Prusiskan tautan, im Land zu Preussen.’

{68} Lord Strangford observes here:  —­’The original forms of Gael should be mentioned—­Gaedil, Goidil:  in modern Gaelic orthography Gaoidheal where the dh is not realised in pronunciation.  There is nothing impossible in the connection of the root of this with that of Scot, if the s of the latter be merely prosthetic.  But the whole thing is in nubibus, and given as a guess only.’

{69} ‘The name of Erin,’ says Lord Strangford, ’is treated at length in a masterly note by Whitley Stokes in the 1st series of Max Muller’s lectures (4th ed.) p. 255, where its earliest tangible form is shown to have been Iverio.  Pictet’s connection with Arya is quite baseless.’

{82} It is to be remembered that the above was written before the recent war between Prussia and Austria.