Some amusing instances of what may be called Saxon puns on Cornish words have been communicated to me by a Cornish friend of mine, Mr. Bellows. “The old Cornish name for Falmouth,” he writes, “was _Penny come quick_,(63) and they tell a most improbable story to account for it. I believe the whole compound is the Cornish _Pen y cwm gwic_, ‘Head of the creek valley.’ In like manner they have turned _Bryn uhella_ (highest hill) into _Brown Willy_, and _Cwm ty goed_ (woodhouse valley) into _Come to good_.” To this might be added the common etymologies of _Helstone_ and _Camelford_. The former name has nothing to do with the Saxon _helstone_, a covering stone, or with the infernal regions, but meant “place on the river;” the latter, in spite of the camel in the arms of the town, meant the ford of the river Camel. A frequent mistake arises from the misapprehension of the Celtic _dun_, hill, which enters in the composition of many local names, and was changed by the Saxons into _town_ or _tun_. Thus _Meli-dunum_ is now _Moulton_, _Seccan-dun_ is _Seckington_, and _Beamdun_ is _Bampton_.(64) This transformation of Celtic into Saxon or Norman terms is not confined, however, to the names of families, towns, and villages; and we shall see how the fables to which it has given rise have not only disfigured the records of some of the most ancient families in Cornwall, but have thrown a haze over the annals of the whole county. Returning to the Jews in their Cornish exile, we find, no doubt, as mentioned before, that even in the Ordnance maps the little town opposite St. Michael’s Mount is called _Marazion_ and _Market Jew_. _Marazion_ sounds decidedly like Hebrew, and might signify _Mârâh_, “bitterness, grief,” _Zion_, “of Zion.” M. Esquiros, a believer in Cornish Jews, thinks that _Mara_ might be a corruption of the Latin _Amara_, bitter; but he forgets that this etymology would really defeat its very object, and destroy the Hebrew origin of the name. The next question therefore is, What is the real origin of the name _Marazion_, and of its _alias_, _Market Jew_? It cannot be too often repeated that inquiries into the origin of local names are, in the first place, historical, and only in the second place, philological. To attempt an explanation of any name, without having first traced it back to the earliest form in which we can find it, is to set at defiance the plainest rules of the science of language as well as of the science of history. Even if the interpretation of a local name should be right, it would be of no scientific value without the preliminary inquiry into its history, which frequently consists in a succession of the most startling changes and corruptions. Those who are at all familiar with the history of Cornish names of places will not be surprised to find the same name written in four or five, nay, in ten different ways. The fact is that those who pronounced the names were