That modern English contains innumerable traces of pure Celtic words used to be a matter of common acceptance, and in the words of Davies, the stoutest assertor of a pure Anglo-Saxon or Norman descent is convicted by the language of his daily life, of belonging to a race that partakes largely of Celtic blood. If he calls for his _coat_ (W. _cota_, Germ. _rock_), or tells of the _basket_ of fish he has caught (W. _basged_, Germ. _korb_), or the _cart_ he employs on his land (W. _cart_, from _càr_, a dray, or sledge, Germ. _wagen_), or of the _pranks_ of his youth, or the _prancing_ of his horse (W. _prank_, a trick, _prancio_, to frolic), or declares that he was _happy_ when a _gownsman_ at Oxford (W. _hap_, fortune, chance, Germ. _glück_, W. _gwn_), or that his servant is _pert_ (W. _pert_, spruce, dapper, insolent); or if, descending to the language of the vulgar, he affirms that such assertions are _balderdash_, and the claim a _sham_ (W. _baldorddus_, idle prating; _siom_, _shom_, a deceit, a sham), he is unconsciously maintaining the truth he would deny. Like the M. Jourdain of Molière, who had been talking prose all his life without knowing it, he has been speaking very good Celtic without any suspicion of the fact.[63] It is noteworthy that in his determination to ignore the Celtic influence, Prof. Skeat concedes only one among the above-mentioned words to the British--(_gwn_). The Welsh _hap_ "_must_," he says, be borrowed from the Anglo-Saxon _gehoep_, and the remainder he ascribes to Middle English or to an "origin unknown". Tyndall has observed that imagination, bounded and conditioned by co-operant reason, is the mightiest instrument of the physical discoverer. It is to imagination that words born in the fantastic and romantic childhood of the world were due, and it is only by a certain measure of imagination that philology can hope to unravel them. The extent to which mythology has impressed place-names may be estimated from the fact that to King Arthur alone at least 600 localities owe their titles. That Arthur himself has not been transmogrified into a Saxon settler[64] is due no doubt to the still existing "Bed," "Seat," "Stables," etc., with which popular imagination connected the mystic king. "Geographical names," says Rice Holmes, "testify to the cult of various gods," and he adds: "it is probable that every British town had its eponymous hero. The deities, however, from whom towns derived their names, were doubtless often worshipped near the site long before the first foundations were laid: the goddess Bibracte was originally the spirit of a spring reverenced by the peasants of the mountain upon which the famous Aeduan town was built".[65] I shall not lead the reader into the intricacies of British mythology deeper than is requisite for an understanding of the words and place-names under consideration, nor shall I enlarge more than is necessary upon the mystic elements in that vast and little known mythology.