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24 REGENT STREET, VICTORIA PARADE,

MY DEAR CARADDAEG,

MELBOURNE, MARCH, 1860.

Many of your friends, who attended the banquet held at the Prince of Wales Hotel, in celebration of the Anniversary of Sant Ddewi, or St. David's Day, (1st March, 1860), have expressed a wish that you should publish your interesting essays on the Language and Early History of the Cimmerians.

I think the publication of a work upon the many curious and imperfectly understood subjects treated of in the papers, portions of which you read on the above-named and subsequent occasions, would be welcomed especially by your countrymen, and, I may add, by the public generally.

It is believed, from the ability evinced therein, that, were you to apply your linqual talent and classical learning to the task of analysing those questions thoroughly, we should have access to more reliable data than are at present available, and a clearer light may be thrown upon the philological, ethnological, as well as the political history of the Cimmerians, and of their descendants, the Cymry or Ancient Britons, the primitive and heroic inhabitants of Ynys Prydain, or the Hyperborean Isles of the West.

There are many reasons which should induce you to attempt to strike out a new path through this terra incognita of history, and, as yet, comparatively unexplored field of Cimbric literature. It is the bounden duty of some one who claims kindred with the Cymry to grapple earnestly and manfully with the subject, and who is not only conversant with the Cimmerian, but having, also, an acquaintance with the idiomatic structure of the other learned languages of antiquity.

There is honor and fame in store for him who can succeed in unravelling the symbolical meaning of the Coelbrennic or Bardic alphabet-which may be instrumental in the elucidation of phi

losophical Druidism, the fervid poetry of Taliesin and the rest of the old Cimbro-Celtic Bards, together with the laws and fragmentary history of the Cymry-a people, notwithstanding the affected superiority of the plagiaristic Saxon, to whom the British Empire (with the Continent of Europe) is so much indebted, in polities, in arts, in arms, and industry, for its world-wide greatness and prosperity.

You have now an opportunity, if you will embrace it, of unmasking the fashionable cant which has been so long indulged in by the historic libellers of the Cimmerians and Cymry;—you may thereby vindicate the historic character of your forefathers, be doing honor to yourself, and, what is of far higher importance, be rendering great service to science and truth.

In conclusion, I trust sufficient reasons present themselves to your mind to induce you to at once prepare the work for the press, and, of course, to extend the work beyond the original design as your judgment and taste may dictate; but, on behalf of myself and friends, including the members of the Cymmrodorion Society, I desire it to be distinctly understood that, for the particular opinions which you may express about men and systems, you must hold yourself alone responsible.

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Thanks for your letter. I gladly undertake the

task, though conscious of the many difficulties that beset my

path.

Yours very sincerely,

JOHN JONES THOMAS.

J. B. HUMFFRAY, Esq., M. L. A.,

Regent Street, Fitzroy.

ix.

INTRODUCTION..

"A general statement of any system of philosophic truths," as a modern writer of distinguished merit justly observes, "may be either a sketch of a doctrine to be established, or a summary of doctrine already established," but lost to view through the revolutions of empires and of eras, as regards a surrounding unCeltic world.

The system herein foreshadowed and annexed partakes of each doctrinal element. Its elaboration, in a theoretical and practical point of view, extends so far as to nullify the generally received opinions of what is deemed the 'learned and veracious world' in reference to the Cimmerians of antiquity-their origin and language, their manners and customs, their hospitality and commerce, their laws and literature, their music and their bards, their princes and their kings, their noble heroes and their chieftains, their merchants and their traders, their farmers and their peasants, —in fact, their prehistoric and historic CIVILIZATION, as well as to exhibit the insidious representations of rival nations, and the conflicting statements of literary incongruities, respecting this once DOMINANT and MIGHTY PEOPLE, of the East and West.

I have cursorily glanced over a few of these contested points in the first six lectures, and, should circumstances permit, I will follow out, in the remaining volumes, the reasonings, under other phases of natural laws and logical interpretation previously unwrought or undeciphered, if not unknown, as far as an ADAMITIC LANGUAGE is concerned. And I trust that, when the whole body of proofs, to be hereafter brought to light of day and inculcated as positive facts of an immemorial world, shall have been stringently scrutinized by the student of nature, of philology, of reason, and of truth, I shall have gone far to demonstrate who

and what people were the originators of mathematical, metaphysical, and astronomical sciences, when Roman and Grecian civilization were as yet in the undeveloped womb of time.

To this intent, I have great pleasure in drawing the attention of the cosmopolitan reader to the "Introductory Dissertation on the Sources and Formation of the Latin Language," by my old schoolfellow, the Rev. Henry Thompson, M. A., and appended to the "History of Roman Literature," and shall accordingly transcribe a passage or two therefrom to prove my case, but will refer the impartial inquirer after hidden truths to the arguments adduced in my "Clavis Adami," and "Clavis Poetarum," and particularly to the "Ingens Facultas Linguæ," for deductions and for facts.

O, that the erudite scholar of St. John's, with all that is brilliant in Cambridge and Oxford, had devoted the tenth part of his valuable time to the study of the Cimmerian, and then all lingual doubts, difficulties, and gropings in the dark, would have been dissipated, like the brain-myth or cant-incomprehensibility of a Cimmerian darkness, to the four winds of heaven, not merely with regard to Latin and Greek derivatives, but also to the Hebrew, Sanscrit, Syriac, and other remnants of the East, as well as to all the ancient tongues or dialects of the earth combined. Let the sceptic-scorner close my book, and study Thompson first.

I cannot here enter upon a recapitulation of proofs elsewhere advanced, respecting the universality and unshaken tenacity of this 'divine truth,' but shall endeavor, very briefly, to philologically anatomise a term taken at random in each of the categories laid down by the Rev. Mr. Thompson, in favor of this or that theory, premising, however, that, with us, each Coelbrennic or bardic letter embodies a peculiar—a distinct meaning of its own, and that, consequently, our Cimmerian letters have ever been considered as ideal words, according to a paradigmatic elementation of the language inherently symbolical therein, and otherwise unknown to any other on the surface of the globe.

"But without, for the present," says Mr. Thompson, very

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