In the realm of etymology, as everybody now knows, before Bopp and Grimm, and other great scholars, laid the sure foundation of comparative philology on the principles of a philosophy, as all true philosophy is, at once inductive and deductive, the license of conjecture played a mad part--a part, it is only too evident, not yet fully played out--and specially raised such a glamour of illusion about topographical etymology, that the theme became disgusting to all sober-minded thinkers, or ludicrous, as the humour might be. We must, therefore, approach this subject with a more than common degree of caution, anxious rather to be instructed in what is solid, than to be amazed with what is ingenious. It shall be our endeavour to proceed step by step in this matter--patiently, as with the knowledge that our foot is on the brink of boggy ground, starting from obvious principles given by the constitution of the human mind, and confirmed by a large induction of unquestioned facts. The most natural and obvious reason for naming a place so-and-so would be to express the nature of the situation by its most striking features, with the double view of impressing its character on the memory, and conveying to persons who had not seen it an idea of its peculiarity; _i.e._ the most obvious and natural topographical names are such as contain condensed descriptions or rude verbal pictures of the object. Thus the notion of the highest mountain in a district may be broadly conveyed by simply calling it the _big mount_, or, according to the order of words current in the Celtic languages, _mount big_; which is exactly what we find in BENMORE, from _mor_, big, the name of several of the highest mountains in the Highlands of Scotland, specially of one in the south of Perthshire, near Killin, of another in Mull, the highest trap mountain in Scotland, and a third in Assynt. Again, to mark the very prominent feature of mountains elevated considerably above the normal height, that they are covered with snow all the year round, we find LEBANON, in the north of Palestine, named from the Hebrew _leban_, white; MONT BLANC, in Switzerland, in the same way from an old Teutonic word signifying the same thing, which found its way into Italian and the other Romanesque languages, fairly ousting the Latin _albus_; OLYMPUS, from the Greek λάμπομαι, to shine; the SCHNEEKOPPE, in Silesia, from _schnee_, snow, and _koppe_, what we call _kip_ in the Lowland topography of Scotland, _i.e._ a pointed hill, the same radically as the Latin _caput_, the head. In the same fashion one of the modern names of the ancient Mount Hermon is _Jebel-eth-Thelj_, the snowy mountain, just as the Himalayas receive their names from the Sanscrit _haima_ = Greek χεîμα, winter.