Or, to take another instance, I shall show that probably because the cat sits washing herself, and is a model of cleanliness in sanitary respects, the cat who figures on the head of the Magna Mater of Crete was elevated into a symbol of the Immaculate or Pure One, and that the word _cat_, German _kater_, is identical with the name Kate or Caterina which means _purity_. The Sanscrit word for _cat_ means literally _the cleanser_, whence it is obvious that the cleanly habits of the cat strongly impressed the Aryan imagination. Whether or not my theories are right, it is undeniable that the etymologies of Skeat and Murray are very often painfully wrong. The standard explanation, for instance, of the word _haha_, meaning a sunk fence, is that it is from the French ha-ha, "an interjection of laughter, hence a surprise in the form of an unexpected obstacle that laughs at one". This may be so, but it is a far wilder guess than anything to be found in my pages, or that I should ever dare to venture. In 1913 I suggested in _Notes and Queries_ that the word ha-ha or haw-haw was simply a re-duplication or superlative of the French _haie_, a fence or hedge, old English _haw_. In the new edition of Skeat I am glad to find this suggestion accepted, and that _ha-ha!_ has been expunged. It still figures in Dr. Murray. In his Canons of Etymology, Prof. Skeat observes:--"The history of a nation accounts for the constituent parts of its language. When an early English word is compared with Hebrew or Coptic, as used to be done in the _old_ editions of Webster's Dictionary, history is set at defiance; and it was a good deed to clear the later editions of all such rubbish". This is curiously parochial, yet it seems to have been seriously accepted by etymologers. But what would Science say nowadays to that geologist or anthropologist who committed the foul deed of discarding or suppressing a vast body of facts simply because they clashed with, or "set at defiance," the "historic" assertions of the Pentateuch? It is true that the history of a nation, _if it were fully known_, must account for the constituent parts of its language, but how much British history do we pretend to know? To suggest that philology must limit its conclusions by the Roman invasion, or bound its findings by the pages of Mrs. Markham, is ludicrous, yet, nevertheless, these fictitious boundaries are the mediæval and pre-Darwinian limits within which the Science of Language is now coffined. Prof. Skeat was reluctantly compelled to recognise a Semitic trace in words such as _bad_ and _target_, but was unable to accept the connection owing to the absence of any historic point of contact between Syria and this country prior to the Crusades! So, too, M. Sebhlani observed numerous close similarities between Arabic and English, but was "unable to press them for lack of a theory as to how they got into English!"