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bonfire. The best of that class of writers should be ordered by the academy to sing songs or indite original verse. As for the rest, some of them might be told off to gesticulate to the gallery, and some to administer the consolations of platitude to stragglers tired of the march of science. There is a mass of other useful work which would naturally devolve on an academy of the kind here suggested. I should be happy, if space permitted, to go through the particulars one by one, but let a single instance suffice: the academy might relieve us of the painful necessity of having seriously to consider any further the proposal that professors found professing after sixty should be shot. This will serve to indicate the kind of work which might advantageously be entrusted to the august body which is here but roughly projected.

There are some branches of learning in the happy position of having no occasion for such a body academical. Thus, if a man will have it that the earth is flat, as flat in fact as some people do their utmost to make it, 'he will most likely,' as the late Mr. Freeman in the Saturday Review once put it, 'make few converts, and will be forgotten after at most a passing laugh from scientific men.' If a man insists that the sum of two and two is five, he will probably find his way to a lunatic asylum, as the economy of society is, in a manner, self-acting. So with regard to him who carries his craze into the more material departments of such a science as chemistry: he may be expected to blow out his own eyes, for the almighty molecule executes its own vengeance. 'But,' to quote again from Mr. Freeman, if that man's craze had been historical or philological'-and above all if it had to do with the science of man or of myth-' he might have put forth notions quite as absurd as the notion that the earth is flat, and many people would not have been

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in the least able to see that they were absurd. If any scholar had tried to confute him we should have heard of "controversies" and "differences of opinion."' In fact, the worst that happens to the false prophet who shines in any such a science is, that he has usually only too many enthusiastic followers. The machinery is, so to say, not automatic, and hence it is that we want the help of an academy. But even supposing such an academy established, no one need feel alarmed lest opportunities enough could no longer be found for cultivating the example of those of the early Christians who had the rare grace to suffer fools gladly.

Personally, however, I should be against doing anything in a hurry; and, considering how little his fellows dare expect from the man who is just waiting to be final and perfect before he commit himself to type, the establishment of an academy invested with the summary powers which have been briefly sketched might, perhaps, after all, conveniently wait a while: my own feeling is that almost any time, say in the latter half of the twentieth century, would do better than this year or the next. In the meantime one must be content to entrust the fortunes of our studies to the combined forces of science and common sense. Judging by what they have achieved in recent years, there is no reason to be uneasy with regard to the time to come, for it is as true to-day as when it was first written, that the best of the prophets of the Future is the Past.

ADDITIONS AND CORRECTIONS

P. 81. I learn that the plural of bodach glas was in Welsh bodachod gleision, a term which Elis o'r Nant remembers his mother applying to a kind of fairies dressed in blue and fond of leading people astray. She used to relate how a haymaking party once passed a summer's night at the cowhouse (beudy) of Bryn Bygely (also Bryn Mygelyď), and how they saw in the dead of night a host of these dwarfs (corynnod) in blue dancing and capering about the place. The beudy in question is not very far from Dolwydelan, on the way to Capel Curig. A different picture of the bodach is given in Jenkins' Bed Gelert, p. 82; and lastly one may contrast the Highland Bodach Glas mentioned at p. 520 above, not to mention still another kind, namely the one in Scott's Waverley.

P. 130. To Sarn yr Afanc add ILyn yr Afanc, near Landinam (Beauties of Wales, N. Wales, p. 841), and Bed yr Afanc, the Afanc's Grave,' the name of some sort of a tumulus, I am told, on a knoll near the Pembrokeshire stream of the Nevern. Mr. J. Thomas, of Bancau Bryn Berian close by, has communicated to me certain echoes of a story how an afanc was caught in a pool near the bridge of Bryn Berian, and how it was taken up to be interred in what is now regarded as its grave. A complete list of the afanc place-names in the Principality might possibly prove instructive. As to the word afanc, what seems to have happened is this: (1) from meaning simply a dwarf it came to be associated with such water dwarfs as those mentioned at p. 432; (2) the meaning being forgotten, the word was applied to any water monster; and (3) where afanc occurs in place-names the Hu story has been introduced to explain it, whether it fitted or not. This I should fancy to be the case with the Bryn Berian barrow, and it would be satisfactory to know whether it contains the remains of an ordinary dwarf. Peredur's lake afanc may have been a dwarf; but whether that was so or not, it is remarkable that the weapon which the afanc handled was a llechwaew or flake-spear, that is, a missile tipped with stone.

P. 131. With the rôle of the girl in the afanc story compare that of Tegau, wife of Caradog Freichfras, on whom a serpent fastens and can only be allured away to seize on one of Tegau's breasts, of which she loses the nipple when the beast is cut off. The defect being replaced with gold, she is ever after known as Tegau Eur-fron, or 'Tegau of the golden Breast.' That is a version inferred of a story which is discussed by M. Gaston Paris in an article, on Caradoc et le Serpent, elicited by a paper published (in the November number of Modern Language Notes for 1898) by Miss C. A.

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Harper, of Bryn Mawr College, U.S.: see the Romania, xxviii. 214-31. One of Miss Harper's parallels, mentioned by M. Paris at p. 220, comes from Campbell: it is concerning a prince who receives from his stepmother a magic shirt which converts itself into a serpent coiled round his neck, and of which he is rid by the help of a woman acting in much the same way as Tegau. We have an echo of this in the pedigrees in the Jesus College MS. 20: see the Cymmrodor, viii. 88, where one reads of G6gabn keneu menrud a vu neidyr vl6ydyn am y von6gyl, Gwgon the whelp of Menrud (?) who was a year with a snake round his neck'-his pedigree is also given. In M. Paris' suggested reconstruction of the story (p. 228) from the different versions, he represents the maiden who is to induce the serpent to leave the man on whom it has fastened, as standing in a vessel filled with milk, while the man stands in a vessel filled with vinegar. The heroine exposes herself to the reptile, which relinquishes his present victim to seize on one of the woman's breasts. Now the appropriateness of the milk is explained by the belief that snakes are inordinately fond of milk, and that belief has, I presume, a foundation in fact: at any rate I am reminded of its introduc. tion into the plot of more than one English story, such as Stanley Weyman's book From the Memoirs of a Minister of France (London, 1895), p. 445, and A. Conan Doyle's Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (London, 1893), pp. 199-209. In Wales, however, it is to a woman's milk that one's interest attaches: I submit two references which will explain what I mean. The first of them is to Owen's Welsh Folk-Lore, p. 349, where he says that 'traditions of flying snakes were once common in all parts of Wales,' and adds as follows:-'The traditional origin of these imaginary creatures was that they were snakes, which by having drunk the milk of a woman, and by having eaten of bread consecrated for the Holy Communion, became transformed into winged serpents or dragons.' The other is to the Brython for 1861, p. 190, where one reads in Welsh to the following effect :-' If a snake chances to have an opportunity to drink of a woman's milk it is certain to become a gwiber. When a woman happens to be far from her child, and her breasts are full and beginning to give her pain, she sometimes milks them on the ground in order to ease them. To this the peasantry in parts of Cardiganshire have a strong objection, lest a snake should come there and drink the milk, and so become a gwiber.' The word gwiber is used in the Welsh Bible for a viper, but the editor of the Brython explains, that in our folklore it means a huge kind of snake or dragon that has grown wings and has its body cased in hard scales: for a noted instance in point he refers the reader to the first number of the Brython, p. 3. It is believed still all over Wales that snakes may, under favourable circumstances, develop wings: in fact, an Anglesey man strongly wished, to my knowledge, to offer to the recent Welsh Land Commission, as evidence of the wild and neglected state of a certain farm, that the gorse had grown so high and the snakes so thriven in it that he had actually seen one of the latter flying right across a wide road which separated two such gorse forests as he described: surprised and hurt to find that this was not accepted, he inferred that the Commissioners knew next to nothing about their business.

Pp. 148, 170. With the spell of security' by catching hold of grass may perhaps be compared a habit which boys in Cardiganshire have of suddenly

picking up a blade of grass when they want a truce or stoppage in a sort of game of tig or touchwood. The grass gives the one who avails himself of it immunity for a time from attack or pursuit, so as to allow him to begin the game again just where it was left off.

P. 228. Bodermud would probably be more correctly written Bodermyd, and analysed possibly into Bod-Dermyd, involving the name which appears in Irish as Diarmait and Dermot.

P. 230. Since this was printed I have been assured by Mr. Thomas Prichard of Lwydiarth Esgob, in Anglesey, that the dolur byr is more commonly called clwy' byr, and that it is the disease known in English as 'black quarter.'

Pp. 259, 268. I am assured on the part of several literary natives of Glamorgan that they do not know dâr for daear, 'ground, earth.' Such nega tive evidence, though proving the literary form daear to prevail now, is not to be opposed to the positive statement, sent by Mr. Hughes (p. 173) to me, as to the persistence in his neighbourhood of dâr and clâr (for claear, ‘lukewarm'), to which one may add, as unlikely to be challenged by anybody, the case of hårn for haearn, 'iron.' The intermediate forms have to be represented as daer, claer, and haern, which explain exactly the gaem of the Book of St. Chad, for which modern literary Welsh has gaeaf, 'winter': see the preface to the Book of ILan Dâv, p. xlv.

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It ought to have been pointed out that the fairies, whose food and drink it is death to share, represent the dead.

290.

P. 291. For Conla read Connla or Condla: the later form is Colla. The Condla in question is called Condla Rúad in the story, but the heading to it has Ectra Condla Chaim, 'the Adventure of C. the Dear One.'

P. 294. I am now inclined to think that butch was produced out of the northern pronunciation of witch by regarding its was a mutation consonant and replacing it, as in some other instances, by b as the radical.

P. 308. With the Manx use of rowan on May-day compare a passage to the following effect concerning Wales-I translate it from the faulty Welsh in which it is quoted by one of the competitors for the folklore prize at the Liverpool Eistedfod, 1900: he gave no indication of its provenance :-Another bad papistic habit which prevails among some Welsh people is that of placing some of the wood of the rowan tree (coed cerdin or criafol) in their corn lands (Hafyrieu) and their fields on May-eve (Nos Glamau) with the idea that such a custom brings a blessing on their fields, a proceeding which would better become atheists and pagans than Christians. P. 325. In the comparison with the brownie the fairy nurse in the Pennant Valley has been overlooked: see p. 109.

P. 331, line 1. For I. 42-3 read ii. 42-3.

Pp. 377, 395. With the story of Ffynnon Gywer and the other fairy wells, also with the wells which have been more especially called sacred in this volume, compare the following paragraph from Martin's Description of the Western Islands of Scotland (London, 1703), pp. 229-30: it is concerning

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