step of its descent is _Trumbull_. A name which excites anything but agreeable associations is _Earwig_. Yet it is at any rate a name that goes back to Anglo-Saxon times, there being an Earwig, no doubt a man of some consideration, a witness to a charter (_Thorpe_, p. 333). And the animal which it represents is not the insect of insidious repute, but the sturdy boar so much honoured by our Teuton forefathers, _ear_ being, as elsewhere noted, a contraction of _evor_, boar, so that Earwig is the "boar of battle." Of more humiliating seeming than even Earwig is _Flea_ (vouched for by Lower as an English surname). And yet it is at all events a name of old descent, for Flea--I do not intend it in any equivocal sense, for the stem is found in Kemble's list of early settlers--came in with the Saxons. And though it has nothing to do with English "flea," yet it is no doubt from the same root, and expresses the same characteristic of agility so marvellously developed in the insect. Even _Bugg_, if he had seen his name under this metaphorical microscope, might have felt himself absolved from changing it into Howard, for Bugg is at least as ancient, and etymologically quite as respectable. It is a name of which great and honourable men of old were not ashamed; there was, for instance, a Buga, minister to Edward of Wessex, who signs his name to many a charter. And there was also an Anglo-Saxon queen, Hrothwaru, who was also called Bucge, which I have elsewhere given reasons for supposing to have been her original name. There are moreover to be found, deduced from place-names, two Anglo-Saxons named respectively Buga and Bugga, owners of land, and therefore respectable. In Germany we find Bugo, Bugga, and Bucge, as ancient names of men and women in the _Altdeutsches Namenbuch_. And Bugge is at present a name both among the Germans and the Scandinavians, being, among others, that of a distinguished professor at Christiania. As to its origin, all that we can predicate with anything like confidence is that it is derived from a word signifying to bend, and of the various senses thus derived, that of ring or bracelet (O.N. _baugr_) seems to me the most appropriate. The bracelet was of old an honourable distinction, and the prince, as the fountain of honour, was the "bracelet-giver."[2]