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Cabinet History of England; Scotland and Ireland
Cabinet History of England Scotland and Ireland Author:James Mackintosh General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1830 Subjects: History / Europe / General History / Europe / Great Britain History / Europe / Ireland Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of thi... more »s book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: ( 21 ) .' CHAP. I. BRITISH AND ROMAN PERIOD TO 500 A. D. The far greater part of the names of mountains, lakes, and rivers, in both the British islands, are to this day descriptive and significant only in some Celtic language. The appellations of these vast and permanent parts of nature are commonly observed to continue as unchanged as themselves. It is therefore Reasonable to believe, that the people of Celtic race were the earliest inhabitants of these islands. As the Gaelic language explains many more of these names than the other branch, the same inference seems to show that those who used that language were the prior colonists. Beyond these probabilities, our ancient history is involved in impenetrable darkness. The Phoenicians and Massilians traded in the tin of Cornwall, and from them geographers spoke of the Cassi- terides, or Tin Islands; but whether the traffic was direct or indirect we are ignorant. The variety of communications in the age of Augustus, from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic through Gaul, by means of the Rhone, the Loire, and the Garonne, for the purpose of the trade in tin, favor the supposition that it was chiefly indirect; to which the ignorance of such a writer as Strabo of the position of the Tin Islands, which he places near the coast of Gallicia, appears likewise to be friendly. On the other hand, Festus Avienus, who constructed that part of his metrical geography which relates to the west from an acquaintance with Carthaginian authorities, places the Tin Islands so n...« less