Although this kind of metamorphosis takes place in every language, yet it is most frequent in countries where two languages come in contact with each other, and where, in the end, one is superseded by the other. _Robertus Curtus_, the eldest son of the Conqueror, was by the Saxons called _Curt-hose_. The name of _Oxford_ contains in its first syllable an old Celtic word, the well-known term for water or river, which occurs as _ux_ in _Uxbridge_, as _ex_ in _Exmouth_, as _ax_ in _Axmouth_, and in many more disguises down to the _whisk_ of _whiskey_, the Scotch _Usquebaugh_.(61) In the name of the _Isis_, and of the suburb of _Osney_, the same Celtic word has been preserved. The Saxons kept the Celtic name of the river, and they called the place where one of the Roman roads crossed the river Ox, _Oxford_. The name, however, was soon mistaken, and interpreted as purely Saxon; and if any one should doubt that Oxford was a kind of _Bosphorus_, and meant a ford for oxen, the ancient arms of the city were readily appealed to in order to cut short all doubts on the subject. The Welsh name _Ryt-yhcen_ for Oxford was a retranslation into Welsh of an original Celtic name, to which a new form and a new meaning had been given by the Saxon conquerors. Similar accidents happened to Greek words after they were adopted by the people of Italy, particularly by the Romans. The Latin _orichalcum_, for instance, is simply the Greek word ὀρείχαλκος, from ὄρος, mountain, and χαλκός, copper. Why it was called mountain-copper, no one seems to know. It was originally a kind of fabulous metal, brought to light from the brains of the poet rather than from the bowels of the earth. Though the poets, and even Plato, speak of it as, after gold, the most precious of metals, Aristotle sternly denies that there ever was any real metal corresponding to the extravagant descriptions of the ὀρείχαλκος. Afterwards the same word was used in a more sober and technical sense, though it is not always easy to say when it means copper, or bronze (_i.e._ copper and tin), or brass (_i.e._ copper and zinc). The Latin poets not only adopted the Greek word in the fabulous sense in which they found it used in Homer, but forgetting that the first portion of the name was derived from the Greek ὄρος, hill, they pronounced and even spelt it as if derived from the Latin _aurum_, gold, and thus found a new confirmation of its equality with gold, which would have greatly surprised the original framers of that curious compound.(62)