limited ultima regio of the pre-historic Cilicians in southern Asia Minor, having the Mediterranean as its recess, or retreat on the south; and the lofty mountain range of Amanus at its back, or retreat, on the east; beyond which frontier limits it would be futile to look after them. Again, along the northern frontiers of this province stands out in bold relief, the lofty, abrupt, rugged summits of Mount Taurus. This term cannot well be derived from the Cimbric tarw, bull; much less from its borrowed equivalent Taupos ; but from the Cimmerian or Armenian tor, an abrupt break, or rupture in the range of mountain peak, as discovered in the old glossaries. The early Asiatic races claim a sort of immemorial prescriptive right of paternity over this and the anti-Tor-Armenian range from a long pre-Grecian residence at the base and slopes of each for ages. The term was no doubt Græcised, according to a wise principle of rule and practice, from its sound into Taupos; and servilely animalised into Taurus, which, in addition to a scholastic, capricious change of a into ev in Ağı-os, probably gave rise to that wonderful superstructure of ferocity—wrecksavageness, ox-headedness, horn-goreing, Centaur-like character of the poor, unfortunate mountaineers of the Crimea, who were, accordingly, sapiently termed Taupoi, Tavρikoi, Tauri, Tauridi; and condemned, malgre eux, as Nebuchadnezzar was of old, to crawl on all-fours, sub Jove frigido, by grave and potent philologists, and out-witted historians, who allowed themselves to be butted like timid groups of maidens fair, in open field and light of day. "Sub sonitu Tauri vel falsâ nominis umbrâ.” Let us, now, retrace our steps, and re-cross the bull-roaming mountain ranges that separate us from the Rivers Halys and Melas, to whose flowery banks, along the plains, I invite you all to follow me. On this latter river the primitive inhabitants suffered a sad defeat under the Medes and Persians under Darius. It has its source in the centre of Cappadocia, not far from Mount Argee, or Argeus; from whose lofty summit both the Black and Mediterranean seas are said to be visible; it discharges itself into the Euphrates in one of the defiles of Mount Tor. Mount Argee, however, seems to glory in its aerial isolation in the midst of extensive plains, as the receiver-general of the rain of heaven in its capacious internal basins; and conequently is the fertiliser-general of the surrounding plains for hundreds of miles east and west. Hence its happy and most natural appellation of Argae, or cronfa dwfr, from ar-cae, receptacle, or reservoir, of water, enclosed within the mountain out of which the waters are known to ooze forth in every direction in perennial springs and fountains full a hundred miles from its base. Our primitive inhabitants, true as the bards to nature and her laws, gave the name of Melas to the stream that pleased their tastes, from mel, honey, and wys, water, in contradistinction to the unsavoury flavour of its neighbour stream, Halys, or Helys, derived from halen, salt, or alkaline, and the root hâl, a salt marsh, which was of an admittedly briny, sour-tasting flavour, from the historically-acknowledged impregnation of certain mineral red-like particles of matter deposited along its course to the Aigwn, or the Euxine. The Turks, as if in conscious corroboration of its Cimmerian derivation, have even given it the name of Kisil-Ermak, or Red River. In addition to this testimony, I find the old Cimmerian name of Karasu (or Croess-aw), the welcome, sweet-tasted Melas,-as in fond remembrance of that endearing torrent in their own lost fatherland, in their beloved Crimea; a practice in usage, whenever available by early colonists in every part of the globe, be it remembered, whether among Greeks and Romans in distant colonies, or among Portuguese and Spaniards in America—a practice, too, handed down to British colonists throughout the length and breadth of our own Australia. I will not trouble you with but one or two more derivations of names given by the primitive inhabitants of the upper provinces. There is an extensive mountain range, separating Cappadocia from Pontus, called Paryedres. The term has its roots in pâr, a germ, and edre, recreation. I leave it to others to decide whether the slopes, or recesses of the hills formed a summer retreat from the heat of the plains, or whether the signification should be attributed to certain fertilising germs, or qualities, in the soil in the rapid growth and development of certain natural productions peculiar to the locality. The Province of Pontus must now attract our attention for a little while. You may remember that it was the first ground in Asia Minor that the Cimmerians must have trodden, after having left the defiles of Colchis. Pontus abounds in river-streams and rivulets to an unusual degree. Hence arose the necessity of at once, or from time to time, constructing temporary crossings, in the shape of wooden logs, or bridges (from the root pont, a bridge), for the purpose of conveying, or transporting, their families and chattels on their primitive waggons to their assigned settlements throughout this impervious water-logged district. It then becomes, par excellence, the earliest bridge-spanned region of the Cimmerian Pont-us. I am afraid this tedious overland route of mine, which the eastern division traced for itself in Asia Minor, has somewhat staggered and exhausted your patience,-but, en revanche, I will take you to the sea-coast to breathe the fresh air of Cordyla (from the root cor, and adail, an encircling pile, or grouping of buildings), and see how the primitive inhabitants of Mount Caucasus, 'à negociandi curâ,' fit out their vessels with skins joined together, (navigia junctis pellibus), and how, in these hide vessels (corio) they manage to sail over the mighty deep, much safer than those barks constructed of fir-trees from the adjacent forests, according to the stem and stern form and pattern of other daring navigators, who are oftener dashed to pieces on rocks above, and rocks beneath, and shoals, and sandy beaches of the Aigswn;-while they, in their notis cumbis,' like brave aquatic birds, proudly ride the storm in perfect safety-to the crew and cargo-from Beisfor, in the north, to Corall-a, the other group or pile of buildings, in the south; and from Meini-Cryfion, in the east, to Deffrobani, in the west,-where we shall recruit our health for a while, and wait in hope and patience for the return of the western invasion from the Crimea, and Cimmeria, so frequently alluded to in the body of this essay--paper-lecture-call it what you will. CHAPTER II. "Should you ask me, whence these stories, "With the odors of the forest, "With the dew and damp of Meadows, With the curling smoke of Wigwams, I should answer, I should tell you, Let us, now, return once more to the Crimea, or Cimmeria, and witness the overflowing exit of another western division, partially described by Strabo. Prior to the journey, however, a few preliminary remarks may be deemed requisite to pave the way to a distinct understanding respecting certain vague items in historical geography, and other contingent shadowings dependent thereon. The Greek geographer, as you shall perceive by and bye, is occasionally ably seconded by our ancient and modern historical bards, who, in accordance with the immemorial functions, and scholastic training of the order, must, from the infancy of bardism, have had peculiar privileges of their own, denied to the world at large, from the exclusive nature of their code, in getting up, by heart, not only the distant records of scenes within the ken of patriarchal times, but who were also expressly appointed to chant, from age to age, as the intermediate case required, the praises of their ancestral warriors. astronomers and legislators, in the persons (par exemple), of an Hu Gadarn (mighty of size), the founder of the British Isles; of a Prince Prydain abb Aedd Mawr, the originator of Britannia's name; of an Idris Gawr y Serydd (Idris the Giant, one of the first astronomers on record; of a Dyfnwai Moel Mud, the Cimbric legislator, second only in time and worth to Moses himself; as well as of other Asiatic chieftains of renown, landing on the shores of Ynys Prydain in pre-historic times. These, and subsequent arrivals, if deemed worthy, either from the display of some peculiar talents, ‘arising from the powers of natural genius and invention,' or from certain phenomena of nature occurring within their days, were at once incorporated into a triad by the periodical Druidical congress, and became, as heretofore, an imperious code of law to be similarly dealt with in the processes of a memoria technica for the further improvement of arts and sciences, by the addition of every new discovery approved by the learned and the wise,-in other distinct and separate classes of triads, as required, either by "history, bardism, theology, ethics, or jurisprudence." Now, in the first place, the vague, undefined, knowledge of geography that prevailed in Homeric and subsequent periods, must prove a barrier, a stumbling-block, to any clear elucidation, from such uncertain data, of the pre-historic Cimmerian names of countries, seas, rivers, mountains cities, and so forth, occupied traversed, or appropriated by the earlier Asiatic colonists, represented, I will say, for the nonce, by Bards, Ovates, and Druids. I will give you but one simple sample of this species of geographical ignorance. Ex uno disce omnes. Herodotus, the pride of Greece and father of history, is blamed by Eratosthenes "an historian of Cyrene, and a protege of Ptolemy Evergetes for ignoring the existence of the Hyperboreans as a people and living in their own country." Indeed, the historian, in lib III. cap. 115, admits that concerning the western extremities of Europe he had no accurate account to give.' I do not hesitate to say that, if the definition of the Ister as marked out and described by Herodotus, in lib II., cap. 53, had been geographically and strictly acted upon by some old corresponding member of the Druidical institute of the past, he would have found himself wandering on the surface of the globe to the end of his days, and not a whit the wiser for his pains, and must have acted on the 'qui vive' principle of a Sisyphus, 'up hill and down dale,' or a Minos in his labyrinth at Cnosus chewing the cud of despair, of anguish, and of death. Moreover, on this showing, Ister would, as the learned Archdeacon of Cardigan facetiously and graphically remarked, "enter the Euxine at a meridian line, passing from south to north, from the mouth of the Nile through mountainous Cilicia to Sinope." You see then what difficulties I have to encounter in limine mei itineris,' which I trust will be taken into account and not lost sight of, during my groping peregrinations after primitive cities, forts, and temples, enveloped almost in Ninivehan obscurity in the wilderness of a world sodden in mystic darkness. And yet, notwithstanding all this labyrinthine evidence of early illuminated Greece, as heralded forth by the father of history himself, there are men in modern times found, with similar pretentions to accuracy as the preceding, to hurl forth the puny thunder of their anathema against the correctnesss-nay, gentlemen, in the pretentious simplicity of their pardonable ignorance declaim against the very antiquity of our pre-historical records, known and appreciated to their full value and import, through the really learned societies of Europe and the world under the immortal name of Triads. In this dilemma the investigator of hidden or lost Cimmerian truths must not be disheartened or become altogether incredulous, "though he were apparently to see historical personages appear in the land of fiction, or historical facts appropriated to fabulous heroes though perhaps often occasioning the greatest anachronisms and most heterogeneous combinations," which a modicum of analysis and care might obviate and explain. In such a contingency the triads are our safest guides though other evidence is not, thereby, to be discarded. The land-marks of the later bards were, undoubtedly, the threefold evidences of the triads, which were scholastically explained from age to age in their Institutional Congresses, but not until they had been finally endorsed by the travelled researches of an Abaris or some other cosmopolitan Druid, or had been by them again submitted to the ordeal of ulterior examination, by means of either local or general testimonies advanced in favor of megalithic structures of one or other nation as recorded in Annalibus Græcorum vel Romanorum,' or other seemingly well-supported traditions. On the authority also of a travelling Druid, a short clause might be inserted in a full congress of bards only, to dictate, and no more, the exact position of a given bardic term by another, if possible, of solid modern date, beginning with |