In dealing with the names of places, people are too fond of thinking that the etymology must be Celtic, if it is not Latin or Anglo-Saxon. Many of these names may go back to the times before the Celts arrived, and there was a population here whose language was probably akin to Basque. Of course, wild etymologists are not to be restrained by such considerations. One of them has gone to ancient Egyptian to get an etymology for Haytor, _Reflections on names and places in Devonshire_, p. 12, ed. 1845, “H’tor in the Phonetic Egyptian meant a house.” But this sort of thing is not confined to Devon. There is an exclamation ‘O popoi’ in Greek, answering to ‘Oh my’ in English. According to Lauth, _Homer und Aegypten_, p. 43, it is an invocation of Pepi, a king who reigned in Dynasty VI and built a Pyramid at Sakkarah. Many places owe their present names to blunders. The Hebrides owe theirs to a misreading in Solinus, ‘hebrides’ for ‘hebudes’: they have no _r_ in Pliny or in Mela or in Ptolemy. There is a bay called Morikambê in Ptolemy, _geographia_, II. 3. 2, on the western side of Britain; and on the strength of this the name of Morecambe was given to a place in Lancashire, although the place is only in the latitude of York, whereas Ptolemy puts Morikambê a whole degree further north. Until 1842, or thereabouts, the present Morecambe was called Poulton, or strictly Poulton-le-Sands to distinguish it from Poulton-le-Fylde, which is the present Poulton. Teign Grace takes its second name from the Grace family, its owners six centuries ago; but people tell me that it really is Teignrace and takes its name from a race in the river Teign a little way below. There was no race there till 1863, when this branch line was begun. The railway blocked a wide curve in the river, and gave it the sharp twist that makes the race. Kingswear is King’s Wear, yet I have heard it called King Swear; and I have also heard Kingskerswell called Kings Curse Well. (It is the part of Kerswell that was kept by the Crown, and Abbotskerswell is the part that was given to Torre Abbey.) But, apart from the pronunciation, the spelling may be misleading in such names as Kerswell, Ogwell, Loddiswell, etc. A well may often be the nucleus of a settlement in arid regions, but not in regions that are full of springs and streams; and in many of these Devonshire names the ‘well’ must stand for ‘vill,’ the ancient term for ‘village.’ As a matter of fact, the termination is spelled with an _i_ in twenty-two cases out of twenty-seven in the Exeter manuscript of Domesday.