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“CELT” NAME TRANSPLANTED TO BRITAIN 131

Celis [in sense of British] the same religion might be in Asia Minor and Skye.’* And, by 1831, the seedling Celtic tree had become established in Britain as a mighty monarch of the forest which sheltered the Aryan theory of the Celts under its branches with the Celts as full-blooded Aryans in race. In that year Dr. Prichard, the ethnologist and philologist, in his“ Eastern Origin of the Celtic Nations,” describes the supposititious “* British Celts’ as Aryans in race, and ascribes to them the introduction of the various Aryan dialects current, before the Anglo-Saxon period* in the British Isles. And, in 1851, Sir Daniel Wilson, the antiquary, calls the British Isles “the insular home of the Keltat.”? The transformation of the people of the British Isles into “ Celt ’’ was then complete.

The older philologists were thus mainly responsible for this arbitrary extension of the name “‘ Celtic” in a racial sense to the earlier inhabitants of the British Isles. The confusion arose through the popular misconception that because a people spoke a dialect of the same group of languages they were necessarily of the same race. The confusion began with the observation by the French philologists that the language of the Celts in Brittany or Mid-Gaul, or “ Celtic ” speech, as it was naturally called by them, was essentially similar in structure to that of the Brythonic or Cymn speech of the Welsh and the Breton of Brittany in Gaul. This Brythonic language was then presumed to be a branch of the Celtic of Gaul, and the term “ Celtic’ applied to it, and then extended in a racial sense to the Welsh people who spoke it. Similarly, the Gaelic or Gadhelic* speech of the Irish and the Scottish Highlanders was also found to have affinity with the Gallic and Welsh “ Celtic,’ and all the people speaking those languages were also dubbed “ Celts.’ The linguistic affinities on which this racial kinship was assumed, were tabulated in two groups by Dr. Latham in 1841,* based on the classification by Prichard and C. Meyer ; and this still

1 Boswell, Life of Johnson, 111. Hebrides Tour, Sept. 18th.

3 eee Ee die Scottish Gaelic Gaidhlig, from Irish-Scot Gaodhal and

Welsh Gwyddel, a Gael or inhabitant of Ireland and Northern Scotland, “R. G. Latham, M.D., English Language, 1841.