The multiplicity and individualism of English surnames form a strange contrast to the tautology of Wales, the Scottish Highlands, and some parts of Southern Scotland, where, with rare exceptions, a name alone means nothing. Great numbers of English names carry of themselves distinction, though the possession of them may sometimes be accidental; or again, when among the early American colonists you find such names as Baskerville, Fettiplace, or Champernowne, if you know your England at all, you know for a certainty who they are and whence they came. But the bulk of English surnames have no particular social significance one way or the other, though many at once proclaim their county, particularly in the lower ranks of life, which have shifted less. Upon the whole our names are perhaps not very sonorous or inspiring. Some are hideously ugly, while many seem of themselves to preclude the possibility of gentle blood, though this is never a safe assumption. Constantly in remote country churches one finds the place of honour among the dead occupied for two or three centuries by a name that seems curiously ill-assorted with broad acres and coat armour. Sometimes it may be a long extinct one whose place knows it no more; or again, one of those still surviving families that have flourished in respectable obscurity, but in local regard, for centuries without ever catching the public ear, or perhaps even the ear of the next county but one! Now Prodgers was once upon a time the supreme conception of a comical vulgarian with Mr. Punch. But the only Prodgers I ever heard of in real life was that ancient family of Wernddu and Gwernvale in Monmouthshire, now extinct or territorially so. Their traditional quarrel with their cousins the Powells of Perther on the score of family precedence led to a well-known humorous incident, which illustrates in entertaining fashion the passion of Welshmen for these things as opposed to the comparative apathy of their Saxon neighbours. The once contemned cockney pseudonym of _Punch_ is of course a corrupted Welsh name (Ap-Rodger), and curiously rare: one of the very few, in fact, that of itself would suggest gentle blood. Rodgers were evidently scarce when the Welsh in the sixteenth century found the inconvenience of pedigree nomenclature and adopted the Christian name of their father (usually) as a permanent surname, rejecting the picturesque suggestion, as it is said, of Henry VIII. that the names of their estates or farms should be adopted; the consequence being that both have to be used to-day in most Welsh counties, on every occasion, from sheer necessity.