eastern neighbours, and such a movement Muley Hassan's successor would be powerless to check. At Ghadames the French may almost any day come into conflict with the Senoussi confraternity, for they are displaying military activity in that quarter, and the place is said to be devoted to the interests of the Mahdi of Jerboub. That the forces of Islam involved in the widespreading ramifications of the Senoussi sect menace the existence of French authority in North Africa it would be exaggeration to allege; that they even threaten its security to a serious extent may not perhaps be the case; but that they oppose a barrier to a French annexation of the great tracts intervening between Senegal and Algeria there can be no question. A false move on the part of the Paris Government, of the executive in Algiers or Tunis, or even of some subordinate official on the southern confines of the French possessions, might of a sudden arouse the fanaticism of the dwellers beyond the outposts, and the news of it would spread like wildfire over the Sahara and the Soudan. Then Mohamed el Mahdi might think his time was come, might proclaim religious war, and might bring into play the vast resources placed at his command by the strange organisation that bears his name. Senoussi has shown no taste for strife. The Mahdi is not to be a man of war. But it is the unexpected which always happens in these lands, and the sheikh may find some day circumstances too strong for him. That these people when they muster under the banner of Islam for fight are formidable the insurrection in the Soudan has served to show.

It does not by any means necessarily follow that a resort to arms on the part of the Senoussi con

fraternity should be preceded by, or should involve, a proclamation by the recluse of Jerboub that he is the Messiah. The intentions, the hopes, and the views, as regards his own rôle on earth, of Mohamed el Mahdi are not known. But it must be confessed that this mysterious personage has some excuse for believing himself to be, as his father said he was, the Mahdi whose coming is expected. A mystic being enshrouded in an atmosphere of saintliness, dwelling in a convent citadel remote from the world; a man of piety and prayer, who has, slowly and for a long time unnoticed, been at work regenerating whole races by means of emissaries quoting a few simple religious dogmas; a man given the name of Mahdi, but not claiming it; a man, moreover, fulfilling many of the conditions that the looked-for Messiah is to fulfil,Senoussi the younger may really think that he is what his disciples hope him to be. Nor does it follow that the assumption by the sheikh of Jerboub, publicly and without reserve, of the position of Mahdi, would involve grave political consequences, or that it would greatly extend the influence of his sect. But it is characteristic of the Moslem faith that in its history and its development politics are ever blended with religion, and that it is when the imagination and emotions of its disciples are worked on, that startling and strange events occur. Senoussi the younger has for more than thirty years headed a great religious movement; he has reached the afternoon of life, and evening is stealing upon him: if he believes himself to be the Mahdi, or if he intends to pose as such, he should be up and doing. Will he be gathered to his fathers a prophet, or will he sink into the grave merely a high priest?

PLACE-NAMES

"THE face of a country," says Joyce, in his admirable book on Irish place-names, "is a book which, if it be deciphered correctly and read attentively, will unfold more than ever did the cuneiform inscriptions of Persia or the hieroglyphics of Egypt." Very true: the names of places, like the heraldic signature of an old family, tell their story through long ages, with an emphasis to which only the utterly crude and unlettered can remain deaf. Thus Constantinople tells to all intelligent people not the mere story of the Turks who now hold it, but the story of the Roman Emperor who, in the first half of the fourth century, virtually deserted Rome, and by planting himself in the midst of old Greek colonies, changed the empire of the Latins into an empire of the Greeks, which carried the language of Plato and St Paul through a whole thousand years as a living bridge betwixt the past and the present, centuries after the classical Latin of Cicero and Virgil had fallen into ruin, and been changed into an entirely new form by the genius of Dante and his Florentine followers. In like manner Adrianople, in spite of its Turkish dress, speaks to us audibly now, as it did through the long course of the middle ages, of the Catholic-minded omnipresence of the best of Roman Emperors, who ruled a mighty empire as a good

OF SCOTLAND.

landlord does his estate, by living amongst his people, and caring for them individually as a father does for his children. In like fashion Alexandria in Egypt speaks of Alexander of Macedonia, and the wonderful military romance with which, in the course of a few years, he embraced the whole East as far as the Jordan with a sweep of Hellenic culture, destined in due season to open the whole world to the preaching of a Christian gospel in the language of the heathen Greeks. And again, the name of Cæsarea, the great harbour of Palestine, gives the signal to the rising power of Rome in the East from Augustus Cæsar downwards, the ejection of the Hebrews from their old sacred capital under Titus, and the gradual transformation of the western half of the old civil government of Rome into an ecclesiastical monarchy under the Pope.

It is no wonder, therefore, especially in this age of rapid movement and easy travel, that books on topographical philology should be in the hands of tourists; and Scotland is a country in this respect particularly happy, in being able to number such thorough workers as Sir Herbert Maxwell, Mr Johnston, Professor Mackinnon, and Mr MacDonald, as her guides through this region of interesting localities of the past. For guides are certainly required, and hard workers too; for obvious

Falkirk.

enjoy the freshness of the green grass, feur, Lat. vir-idis, on the lon-Eng. lawn, a word immortalised also in our mighty London -the dun or fort on the low ground beside the Thames—and familiar also to the Welsh ear in llan, seen in Lanark, and a few other Scottish names. You then look up to the peak of the lofty ben-Lat. pinna-which bounds your view, and casting your eye around, you are pleasantly lost in the luxuriant wealth of the adjacent forest-coille, Lat. silva, Gr. λn, and the graceful leafage of the lady-birch (beith) - betula. You enter the pine-grove behind your cottage, and are surprised to find that both this grove and this cottage assault your ears under the slightly modified form of craob and tigh-Lat. tignum. Then, if you Then, if you are fond of bathing, you take a dip in the water that flows through the glen, and find that the bath which you are enjoying means in Gaelic bath, to drown, evidently the same as the Gr. ẞáπтw, from which comes our baptise. Then you ask the peasant boy whom you meet after your dip what is the name of the river, and what is the Gaelic for water: the river, he says, is called the Esk, and the Gaelic for water is uisge. "Uisge!" you say, "that sounds very like whisky," and so it is unquestionably, as the schoolmaster may tell you-uisge-beatha, the full Gaelic for the strong drink of the mountains, being neither more nor less than a compound of uisge, water, and beatha, life, evidently the Lat. vita-eau de vie, as the French call it. But what is uisge? which appears also in the name of more than one Scottish river. The Esk is simply uisge, the water, the oldest form of the Lat. aqua, which appears also, probably, in the Gr. 'Axeλoos: and if further you happen

to have been at Aberfeldy, in beautiful Perthshire, singing to yourself "The Birks of Aberfeldy," in a glen where no birches are now to be seen, you will certainly have visited the rush of waters to the south of the town called the Falls of Moness, which is simply a descriptive name composed of eas, a modification of the same root, and monadh, a high brow-Lat. mons

or moine, the Gaelic for peats, which are generally cut from the high ground. And not only in the Scottish Highlands, but in England also, and partially over all Europe, you will find that the names of rivers which, for obvious reasons, chiefly resist change of time, have a Gaelic or very old Aryan touch about them. This appears in the familiar name of the Avon, well known to all devout pilgrims to the land of Shakespeare, which is only a Celtic softening of the Lat. amnem, and which appears sometimes curtailed into simple n. Thus in France we have the Garonne, which in plain Gaelic is garb-abhuinn, or rough water; and probably enough the final n in the Seine, the Rhone, and the Rhine has the same origin.

on or the

Another common name for river, both in England and Scotland, is don, from Gaelic doimhne, deep, or donn, dark-brown, which appears as simple Don in Aberdeen, anciently called Aberdon, and in England, Doncaster, with the familiar addition of caster, or Roman camp. And not only so, but the noble Thames itself, like the town of which it is the belt, is of Celtic origin, being obviously identical with tamh, Gr. Saμáw, Eng. tame, from which also the Highland Tay, as contrasted with the roughness of the Garry and the downflow (taom, Lat. tumeo) of the Tummel, receives its significant designation.

And not only rivers, but wherever we turn our eyes, the great features of the country and the names of the oldest abodes of "food-eating mortals" speak to us, in language strange only to those who are unpractised to discover an old friend with a new face. Ard, Lat. arduus, meets us everywhere; ach, a field, Lat. ager, Gr. dypós; inver and aber, Lat. infra, at the confluence of rivers -like Coblentz from confluentia. And in our pedestrian tours through the roadless wilderness of the Bens, whether we cross a deep pool (linne, Gr. Aíuvn, old Eng. lin), or a torrent roaring like a bull (the Tarf, Lat. taurus, Gr. Taupos), or a rough ridge (drum, Lat. dorsum), or slide down a sloping brae (sliabh, Lat. clivus), we are always on ground where an intelligent young prizeman fresh from Eton or Fettes will find himself as much at home as if, on a benefit night at Drury Lane or the Lyceum, he were to behold a fair friend paraded in old English dress to play the part of Cordelia or Lady Macbeth in Shakespeare.

So far well. "Plain sailing," you will say; "but are there no rocks, no shallows?" Certainly. The one great difficulty in Gaelic is the same as in English to all foreigners-the pronunciation. In other languages, as Italian and German, if you know how to spell & word you know how to pronounce it: the printed word indicates the spoken sound. In Gaelic it is often otherwise-in some cases, indeed, systematically otherwise; but the irregularity in these cases is subject to a law, which a discriminating ear can lightly comprehend. This and all other specialties in the practice of the languages, which age after age have left their traces on Scottish local names, will be found learnedly discussed in the

This

second, third, and fourth chapters of Sir Herbert Maxwell's masterly volume; but for popular purposes, the main point as it affects the pronunciation of Gaelic words is simply this: When a language in a fixed literary form passes into a new language, under foreign influences such as Latin when it became French-new ears and new habits of articulation combine to give the old word a new form, by a process which may best be compared to the change which a rough chip of granite suffers when its edges are smoothed off by the flow of the mountain torrent, or the plash of the ocean wave. process, as observed in Gaelic, shows itself principally in three forms-simple curtailment, dropping of initial or terminational affixes; shaving or softening down a rough letter into its cognate smooth; or last, in absolute extrusion of the rough letter, with the consequent resolution of two syllables into one. Thus, exactly as in Italian the Lat. laborem becomes lavoro, so in Gaelic, b becomes bh v in the flexion of verbs and nouns; and generally this h is used in Gaelic not merely for softening the consonant to which it is appended, but for absolute extrusion, as soirbheas, pronounced soeras, and so forth. Another familiar example is gabhar, a goat, which, as it appears to the eye, is plainly a softened variety of the Lat. caper, a goat; but when the h with its overwhelming smoothness is allowed to sweep away the labial consonant altogether, the ear finds only gour left, as in Ardgour, Kilgour, and other familiar names of places and persons, in which it requires the practised ear of a philologer to recognise the original type. But more confounding still it is when the extrusion of the medial

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