Let it be clearly understood, however, from the first that I am not writing as an expert on these matters, nor as having a direct knowledge of Celtic or of Saxon. All I have attempted has been simply to collect, for the benefit of those who shall be attracted to the study of our place-names as elucidating the ancient history of the County, information from many sources which will save them the time and labour of finding out for themselves whether a particular name is old enough to be found in Domesday Book, or in later Saxon charters and wills; and especially there has been in my mind the hope that a committee may be appointed to deal as well with Kent as other Counties have been, especially by the great Anglo-Saxon scholars, Professor Skeats, Professor Craigie, of Oxford, and Professor Mawer, of Newcastle. For such literary artizans and architects as I hope may shortly arise, I am more than content to have been but a day labourer, a collector of material which others may find worthy of scrutiny and perhaps of use. [Illustration: decorative glyph] PLACE NAMES IN KENT. Place Names of Celtic Origin. Men of Kent must not make too much of their county motto, _Invicta_. As a matter of fact, we have been conquered at various times, and sometimes before the rest of England succumbed to the invader. The aborigines, who were probably somewhat like the Esquimeaux, a small race, having only stone weapons and tools, lived on the fringe of the great glacier of the last Ice Age (perhaps 50,000 years ago), which enabled one (though doubtless no one tried) to walk from what is now Middlesex and Kent to the North Pole; even the present North Sea being part of the great sheet of ice which covered all our land down to the north bank of the Thames. When climatic conditions altered for the better, England (to call it by its much later name) became desirable to the great west-ward migration of the Celts, who had already over-run all North Europe. This was the first of the five great waves of peoples who from the East seized on Europe, each driving its predecessor westward. The Celtic is, at any rate, the first to be clearly traced. It was divisible into the Gadhelic and the Cymric (or Brythonic) element, from the former the Erse, Gaelic, and Manx languages being derived, and from the latter the Welsh and the Breton (Ancient British and Gaulish, the Cornish, and probably the Pictish).