{66} See _Les Scythes_, _les Ancêtres des Peuples Germaniques et Slaves_, par F. G. Bergmann, professeur à la faculté des Lettres de Strasbourg: Colmar, 1858. But Professor Bergmann’s etymologies are often, says Lord Strangford, ‘false lights, held by an uncertain hand.’ And Lord Strangford continues:—‘The Apian land certainly meant the watery land, _Meer-Umschlungon_, among the pre-Hellenic Greeks, just as the same land is called Morea by the modern post-Hellenic or Romaic Greeks from _more_, the name for the sea in the Slavonic vernacular of its inhabitants during the heart of the middle ages. But it is only connected by a remote and secondary affinity, if connected at all, with the _avia_ of Scandinavia, assuming that to be the true German word for _water_, which, if it had come down to us in Gothic, would have been _avi_, genitive _aujôs_, and not a mere Latinised termination. Scythian is surely a negative rather than a positive term, much like our _Indian_, or the _Turanian_ of modern ethnologists, used to comprehend nomads and barbarians of all sorts and races north and east of the Black and Caspian seas. It is unsafe to connect their name with anything as yet; it is quite as likely that it refers to the bow and arrow as to the shield, and is connected with our word to _shoot_, _sceótan_, _skiutan_, Lithuanian _szau-ti_. Some of the Scythian peoples may have been Anarian, Allophylic, Mongolian; some were demonstrably Aryan, and not only that, but Iranian as well, as is best shown in a memoir read before the Berlin Academy this last year; the evidence having been first indicated in the rough by Schaffarik the Slavonic antiquary. Coins, glosses, proper names, and inscriptions prove it. Targitaos (not -tavus) and the rest is guess-work or wrong. Herodotus’s Ταβιτι for the goddess Vesta is not connected with the root _div_ whence Dêvas, Deus, &c., but the root _tap_, in Latin _tep_ (of tepere, tepefacere), Slavonic _tepl_, _topl_ (for _tep_ or _top_), in modern Persian _tâb_. _Thymele_ refers to the hearth as the place of smoke (θύω, _thus_, _fumus_), but _familia_ denotes household from _famulus_ for _fagmulus_, the root _fag_ being equated with the Sansk. _bhaj_, _servira_. Lucan’s Hesus or Esus may fairly be compared with the Welsh _Hu_ Gadarn by legitimate process, but no letter-change can justify his connection with _Gaisos_, the spear, not the sword, Virgil’s _gæsum_, A. S. _gár_, our verb to _gore_, retained in its outer form in _gar_-fish. For _Theuthisks lege Thiudisks_, from _thiuda_, _populus_; in old high German Diutisk, Diotisk, _popularis_, _vulgaris_, the country vernacular as distinguished from the cultivated Latin; hence the word _Dutch_, _Deutsch_. With our ancestors _theód_ stood for nation generally and _getheóde_ for any speech. Our diet in the political sense is the same word, but borrowed from our German cousins, not inherited from our fathers. The modern Celtic form is the