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During the sail across, to all who wish to lend an ear, a something of the past, a yarn, as sailors say, I have to spin about this very sea, about this very outlet, too, of rushing waters, wafted by the gentle gales,' and rapid current of its stream; so little known in pre-Achæan times of what they did, in safe retreat within their life-spared creeks, as well at first to Cimbric fleets, as in such succeeding times to Dardanian barks that from the Aigsun and the straits did issue forth, in shattered, timbershivered plight.

"The wind swept down the Euxine, and the wave
"Broke foaming o'er the blue Symphlegades;
"'T is a grand sight, from off "The Giant's grave,"
To watch the progress of those rolling seas

"Between the Bosphorus, as they lash and lave

66

Europe and Asia, you being quite at ease;
"There's not a sea the passenger e'er pukes in

"Turns up more dangerous breakers than the Euxine."

The British and foreign classic societies, alas! in the perversity, if not anility of their souls (and seemingly unconscious to their own loss when travelling on Cimmerian sites), are stoically regardless of the proprieties and properties' of a language that ought long ago to have had a professorial chair in the principal universities in Europe. Let the scorner be chary of his sneer.

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The inevitable result of this 'statu quo' principle is that these self-satisfied professors are seen ever' capering,' and 'jumping the empty claims' of a Varro and his school, on the golden banks of the Ægæan sea, in order to catch a stray Asiatic or Cimmerian goat, or Grecian ac, and throw the little innocent, springing' animal as a marine holocaust, with, if you will, aut impetuosity, into the skipping sea, in all the don-like pomp and ceremony of a donna fair, dashing a bottle of Falernian wine against the nameless quarters of a ship, to baptise or dub it with a name.

Listen to, and judge for yourselves, the oracular voice of the cosmopolitan charmer that hath bewitched the worn-out world in teens in favor of its dicta. "Annon in mari terraque ab his regionum noto? In mari, quod nominarîunt a capris Egoum pelagus? ad Syriam montem Taurum? in Sabinis Canterium montem? (Have not the characteristic indications of regions, both by sea and land, been taken from them? was not the Egean sea derived from Alyɛç (Capris)? the mountain on the northern confines of Syria, from Taupos? and that in the territory of the Sabines from Cantherium ?)" an animal of some genus or other to be hereafter revealed.

Our modern parrot-acceptors and 'repétiteurs,' as well as the ancient inventors of these anile conceptions, and fabled incongruities, seem to us Cimmerians of the outer world to have stood still for ages, like the fussy little squirrel in his cage,

"And still he's in the self-same place
"Where at his setting-out he was;"

as far as progressive knowledge of the past is concerned; or, perhaps, it might be said, as far as enlarged original views of countless classic roots come within their unavailing grasp, they contrive to represent, by no means inaptly, the Linnoan Limax, which appears to have the power of becoming torpid at pleasure, and, independent of any alterations in temperature, as well as when attached at Midsummer-term to the walls of its little college, the faculty of remaining in this dormant state for years."

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This ever-breathing, yet dormant school, relying as it does on this sandy, dust-eyed foundation, created by the capering antics of a goat, a bull, or gelding, must, forsooth, come to grief with the avat avdowv Tε OɛWν Tε himself, in reference to a false deduction, formed of one of his essential prerogatives, of "ayioxos, the stormappeaser," the tempest-restrainer; who, as Zeus, I am almost sure, will not allow himself to be thus quietly dubbed a sort of bottleholder' of an eastern, or western, prize-fight, to suit the peculiarities, or whims, of any school, or nation, or, in fact, a ' a mere goatskin-holder,' of the putrid, unwholesome, waters of a Pallus Maethus, to please any Senatus Academicus in Europe. Could the "dies ir, dies Jovis in favillâ " have been penned in anticipation of the proffered insult?

Shakespeare, too, must have had an inkling, a presentiment, of something wrong, if not rotten, in the state, when a 'capering' Billy or a Nanny was called in, pro formâ, to represent the character of the Egoum, when he pithily exclaimed:

"To be once in doubt

"Is-once to be resolved; Exchange me for a goat,

"When I shall turn the business of my soul

"To such exsufflicate and blown surmises

66

Matching thy inference."

If such be not the origin of the term Egoum, what, then, can be the interpretation of it?

This Ægean sea, in comparison to the stormy, roaring, bleak, isle-less, bay-less, port-less, surge-inhospitable, character of the Black Sea, or Axinus, must have at once presented a striking contrast to the earliest Cimmerian navigators, who, in happy accordance with their invariable adhesion to the laws and formulæ of nature in such matters, gave it the appropriate name of

Aigwm," from aig, a sea, and wm, a covert, a shelter, a retreat, a protection to be found against every wind and boisterous gale in some of the countless bays and ports of the mainland-coast, or mid-sea isles.

On the same sound principle of natural, philosophical derivatives which were, and are to this day, peculiarly held sacred in the superlative exclusiveness and excellence of the Cimbric language, is to be traced the unmistakeable name of another sea.

A few remarks may be necessary to explain that the Cimbric has neither the x or k in its composition. The sound of the former being taken up by gs, or cs, that of the latter by c (always hard).

Let us see how the pre-historic Argeians, Danaans, or Achæans, adapted the primitive sound of Cimmerian waters. The vaunted Hellenes had not, up to the period 'qui nous occupe,' so much as shown their faces to the Cyclic or Homeric poems. Their language was, as yet, but a okia ɛpyov, an adumbration of reality.

Now, as the name of the waters of the Black Sea is known originally to have been Ağıvos, which in the borrowed ears of these immemorial visitors could have had no definite meaning whatever, it was resolved to change it into Αξεινος, οι Αξενος, signifying inhospitable, by a dastardly implication and reflection on the inhabitants of the coast; but hereafter, seeing the injustice done to the Cimmerians, they had the good taste and policy to euphonise it by an Evževos; no difficulty can arise to solve this problem of the past.

What was, then, the acoustic sound of Ažɩv-os first caught, repeated, and endorsed by writing?

It was Aigswn, resolvable into the exact sound of Aixoon, having its logical interpretration in aig, a sea, and sun, a noise, a sound,

a roar.

Let Soudac, Kalamita Bay, and Metophon, maintain the aptness of the term; let each, in turn, reverberate the roars and whistling-sounds, predicting death to French and British tars, of this tempestuous sea. Let a Byron, or a Russell of the Times, proclaim aloud for evermore this potent truth of ages, in strains not deemed unworthy of the theme.

Th' indignant Aigswn saw the fraud, and black
As Marmor turned, at treatment so unjust

As to impute inhospitality

To those that leathern barks had launched

In confidence, e'er unalloyed by fear,

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On its roaring main; soon the tempest-sound
The deed conveyed on an airy wave,' where
Prydain's race, intent to colonize

The Hyperborean west, might vengeance take
On plagiaristic wiles. Th' intercepted

Sound, alas! was caught against the barrier-hills,

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Entrapped beneath th' exhausted pump' of Greece
And smuggled kept for full three thousand years
At least, 'till Boreas blew another blast

Of retribution, due to glories lost,

On an unerring water-wave,' across

Each hostile fleet that durst with cannon

Roar of warning, or of fright, its movement
From its centre mar, in curvilinear

Forms to Cambria's shore.

Time forbids me as I ought to test at length all the ancient Briton's European seas and straits: his they were, by right of conquest, as of names. Britannia, then, has never ceased to rule the waves in ancient or in modern bardic times, from pigmy boats to Druid oak and iron-framed Chalybian plates.

The Aigswn, Aigwm, like their armlet neighbours, Beisfor and Allwys, have thus, you see, retained their true-accented sounds through all the ordeal of succeeding tongues, but lost their birthright and primeval sense, amid the endless capering' tossings of the Ægean waves, by speculating traffickers in Varroian bulls and goats, and other nameless animated things of earth.

6

"Sic pia fraus Græcæ, sic transit gloria linguæ."

Though I have no business, strictly speaking, to meddle with either Taurus or Cantherium on this marine excursion, as not hailing from any Tоpoμɛia porth or harbour in the Aigwm, or the more dangerous Aigswn, I cannot allow the latter to pass by unobserved as it comes inadvertently in my way, since the former has been already disposed of at the Cilician abattoir of Mount Tor.

"Sternitur, exanimisque tremens procumbit humi bos."

Here I cannot help remarking, but that Virgil, in this allusion to the obsequies of the gallant Tauriscus, must have cast an ironical glance at the audacity of some Lapithæ, "Centaurs ou cavaliers Thessaliens, qui etaient aussi illustres pour la chasse aux Taureaux que pour elever et dompter la race chevaline," in paying court to one of the "female grenadiers and bull-stranglers " of Laconia, as flatteringly expressed by an Aristophanesian admirer.

Or:

“ Ω φίλτατε Λακαινα, χαιρε

“ Οιον το καλλος, γλυκυτατη, σου φαίνεται
“ Ως δ' ευχροεις ως δε σφριγα το σωμα σου
« Καν Ταυρον Αγχοις.”

"Beloved Laconian, welcome!

"How glorious is thy beauty, love! how ruddy
"The tint of thy complexion! vigor and health
So brace thy frame that thou

"A bull couldst throttle."

With regard to the term Cantherium, I must candidly admit it has somewhat perplexed me. Does the cosmopolitan Varro of our day insinuate that some distinguished benighted traveller had, on his return home, imported a кav0os, a donkey, a gelding from the land of Egypt, to graze on the mountain's verdant slopes ? or does he refer to some othor Onpiov, with some sacred mark impressed on its tongue, as was done on that of the Bull Apis? or, finally, he may perhaps allude to some geographer turned naturalist, who let fly out of his insect box a quantity of Kav@apides, to buzz, and classify the country by their discordant notes.

As nothing definite can be gleaned, or elucidated, from such sources, let us look elsewhere for a solution. The Umbri et Sabini formed part of that early pre-historic family of the Veteres Galli, in North and Central Italy, known historically and ethnologically, the one as the "Antiquissimus Italiæ Populus" of Florus; the other as the "Gens Antiquissima Italia" the aborigines of Pliny, under the name of "Fratres et Consanguinei;" the root, therefore, of the Sabine mount will be found in can, s.m., sight, brightness, whiteness, hence can-us, white, and terra, primitively tera, equivalent to the Cimbric or Umbric tir, land, earth, ground, or combinedly expressed can-tir, can-ter, (ius), mons, otherwise the "land of brightness." My yarn is nearly spun.

The favoured land of Ma-ced-on(ia) now draws near, from the roots ma, a place, a spot, ced, a favour, gift, relief, and on, superior, continuous. I'll make a present of the ia to those who, sub rosâ, claim the term. We pass, with baffled sails, the drifting eddies of the despairing, point-cragged Phlegra; and then apply, in gallant style, the bending oars along the bay, till at last we reach the pebbly-bottomed shore of Gallt y Gigwn, on its eastern side, near the massive shrines of the Gigonian cliff, our present destination.

Having taken a hurried tour in the neighbourhood, and made a rapid survey of the southern extremity of the peninsula of Chalcidice (Calchaidd, or Calcareous loam, from the root calch, lime, enamel), as far as the Strymon (from ystrum, a main-stream, a current, a channel), it will be perceived that it is forked out as it were, into three prongs, or long narrow promontories; at the extremity of one will be discovered Mount Athos, or Mynydd Attws, from at, as far as, and tws, the extremity; at the other Torone, from toron, s.f., flat, deck out, cloak; at the third Phlegra, from flegg, a squeak of despair, and rha, petulant; into each of which, I presume, at the very outset of its colonization, detached families, or tribes, entered, ignorant, as new colonists would necessarily be, as to their respective size and proportion; but, finding it too circumscribed for their flocks and herds, issued forth again from the said promontories, and met, or crossed, each other (croessi naill y llall), on the shores of the Thermous Sinus, now the Gulf of

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