Whether or not Pegasus was Big Esus or Peg or Puck Esus is immaterial, but it is quite beyond controversy that the animals now under consideration are Elphin Steeds and that they are not the "deplorable abortions" which numismatists imagine. The recognised authorities are utterly contemptuous towards our coinage, to which they apply terms such as "very rude," "an attempt to represent a horse," "barbarous imitation," and so forth; but I am persuaded that the craftsmen who fabricated these archaic coins were quite competent to draw straightforward objects had such been their intent. Akerman is seriously indignant at the indefiniteness of the object which resembles a fishbone and "has been called a fern leaf," and he sums up his feelings by opining that this uncouth representation may be as much the result of incompetent workmanship as of successive fruitless attempts at imitation.[297] [Illustration: FIGS. 124 to 127.--Iberian. From Barthelemy.] [Illustration: FIGS. 128 and 129.--Iberian. From Akerman.] [Illustration: FIG. 130.--Gaulish. From Akerman.] Incompetent comprehension would condemn Figs. 124 to 129, particularly the draughtsmanship of the head: it is hardly credible, yet, says Akerman, the small winged elf in these coins "apparently escaped the observation of M. de Saulcy". They emanated from the Tarragonian town of Ana or Ona, and are somewhat suggestive of the mythic tale that Minerva sprang from the head of Jove: the horses on the Gaulish coin illustrated in Fig. 130, which is attributed either to Verdun or Vermandois, are inscribed VERO IOVE and that Jou was the White Horse is, to some extent, implied by our elementary words _Gee_ and _Geho_. According to Hazlitt "the exclamation Geho! Geho! which carmen use to their horses is not peculiar to this country, as I have heard it used in France":[298] it is probable that the Jehu who drove furiously was a memory of the solar charioteer; it is further probable that the story of Io, the divinely fair daughter of Inachus, who was said to have been pursued over the world by a malignant gadfly, originated in the lumpish imagination of some one who had in front of him just such elfin emblems as the pixy horse now under consideration. That in reality the gadfly was a good _mouche_ is implied by the term gad: the inscription KIO on Fig. 74 (p. 253) reads Great Io or Great Eye, and in connection with the remarkable optic of the White Horse at Uffington may be connoted the place-name Horse Eye near _Bex_hill. The curious place-name Beckjay in Shropshire is suggestive of Big Jew or Joy: the blue-crested monarch of the woods we call a jay (Spanish, _gayo_, "of doubtful origin") was probably the bird of Jay or Joy--just as _picus_ or the crested woodpecker was admittedly Jupiter's bird--and the Jaye's Park in Surrey, which is in the immediate neighbourhood of Godstone, Gadbrooke, and Kitlands, was seemingly associated at some period with Good Jay or Joy.