Both in small and great things, philology, dealing with Celtic matters, has exemplified this tending of science towards unity. Who has not been puzzled by the relation of the Scots with Ireland—that _vetus et major Scotia_, as Colgan calls it? Who does not feel what pleasure Zeuss brings us when he suggests that _Gael_, the name for the Irish Celt, and _Scot_, are at bottom the same word, both having their origin in a word meaning _wind_, and both signifying _the violent stormy people_? { 68} Who does not feel his mind agreeably cleared about our friends the Fenians, when he learns that the root of their name, _fen_, ‘white,’ appears in the hero Fingal; in Gwynned, the Welsh name for North Wales in the Roman Venedotia; in Vannes in Brittany; in Venice? The very name of Ireland, some say, comes from the famous Sanscrit word _Arya_, the land of the Aryans, or noble men; although the weight of opinion seems to be in favour of connecting it rather with another Sanscrit word, _avara_, occidental, the western land or isle of the west. { 69} But, at any rate, who that has been brought up to think the Celts utter aliens from us and our culture, can come without a start of sympathy upon such words as _heol_ (sol), or _buaist_ (fuisti)? or upon such a sentence as this, ‘_Peris Duw dui funnaun_’ (‘God prepared two fountains’)? Or when Mr. Whitley Stokes, one of the very ablest scholars formed in Zeuss’s school, a born philologist,—he now occupies, alas! a post under the Government of India, instead of a chair of philology at home, and makes one think mournfully of Montesquieu’s saying, that had he been an Englishman he should never have produced his great work, but have caught the contagion of practical life, and devoted himself to what is called ‘rising in the world,’ when Mr. Whitley Stokes, in his edition of _Cormac’s Glossary_, holds up the Irish word _traith_, the sea, and makes us remark that, though the names _Triton_, _Amphitrite_, and those of corresponding Indian and Zend divinities, point to the meaning _sea_, yet it is only Irish which actually supplies the vocable, how delightfully that brings Ireland into the Indo-European concert! What a wholesome buffet it gives to Lord Lyndhurst’s alienation doctrines!