Now, Mr. T. Kerslake, of Bristol, who has applied himself with singular acumen to the unravelling of sundry knotty points of our ancient history, is inclined to hold that the Totnes of the chronicles was a distinct place, and he has pointed out that the Welsh chronicles contain “early forms of the names of this favourite British port that has got to be thus confounded with Totnes.” In the “Brut Tysilio,” for example, the place of the landing of Brutus is called “Talnas” (at least, this is the printed form given in the Myvyvian Archæology); “Brut Gr. ab. Arthur” reads “Totonys”; and in a third, the “Hafod Chronicle,” we have “Twtneis.” Mr. Kerslake, therefore, treats “Talnas” as the earliest form of the word, and thereon builds the hypothesis that “the name given by the British writers to their port would resolve itself into ‘’t-aln-as’ and if Christchurch Haven should be conceded to be Ptolemy’s estuary of Alaunus, it would also be the port called by the Britons ‘Aln’ or ‘’t-Aln-as,’ from which Vespasian advanced up to Alauna Sylva, or Caer Pensauelcoit—the City in the Head of the High Wood.” There can be little doubt, I think, that Mr. Kerslake is right in regarding Penselwood as the site of Caer Pensauelcoit, given as Exeter by Geoffrey of Monmouth, not apparently on the authority of his British original, but, as in other cases, for his own gloss; and thenceforward cherished most fondly as one of the worthiest memories of the “ever-faithful” city by its chief men and antiquaries. If it was at Totnes town, or in Torbay, into which some critics have expanded the idea of the “Totonesium littus,” that Vespasian landed immediately before his siege of “Kairpen-Huelgoit,” then there is considerable force in Geoffrey’s comment, “quæ Exonia vocatur.” If Penselwood, on the borders of Somerset, Dorset, and Wilts, were this “Primæval British Metropolis,” then we must give up the idea that Vespasian landed at Totnes town, or anywhere in its vicinity. However, it by no means follows that there was such a place as Totnes in the Talnas sense, as localised by Mr. Kerslake. Talnas is the single exception, so far as I am aware, to an otherwise general concord of agreement in favour of Totnes, at a date when Totnes town had not yet risen into such prominence as to justify or explain its appropriation of this tradition. The general sense of the language used when Totnes and the Totnes shore are mentioned, lead me, as I have already said, to the conclusion that it was rather the name of a district than of a town or port; and it was evidently understood in this sense by Higden, who in his Chronicle quotes the length of Britain as 800 miles,“a totonesie litore,” rendered by Trevisa, “frome the clyf of Totonesse,” which I take to be only another form of expression for the Land’s End.