Who then can any longer doubt but that this was the island of the Hyperboreans? Even the _peculiarity_ of our language mingles in the chain of proof; as Diodorus states that “the Hyperboreans use _their own_ natural tongue.” But were all other arguments wanting, I would undertake to prove the identity by an admission from this transcriber himself. “The sovereignty of this city,” says he, “and the care of the temple belong to the _Boreades_.”[517] Now, nothing ever has puzzled etymologists so much to explore as the origin of the Irish term _Bards_.[518] The _guesses_ which they have made thereat are so exceedingly amusing, that I will take leave to _refresh_ myself, exhausted and languid as I now wellnigh am, with the outline of a few. First, Bochart would derive it from _parat_, to speak!!! Wilford from the Sanscrit, _varta_!!! But “some learned friends of his are of opinion that it comes from _bhardanan_, to burthen!!! because burthened with the internal management of the royal household”!!! I shall spare my reader any more of those _caricatures_, and submit to his own candour to adjudicate whether _Bards_ could, by possibility, be anything else than the modern Englification for our ancient _Boreades_? Doubtless, Professor Müller, your astonishment has now subsided as to Hecatæus’s credulity in the existence of the Hyperboreans. Diodorus Siculus, who, though, as Granville Penn has affirmed, he “has transmitted to us many _scattered_ and important truths,” yet does the same judicious commentator add, that it was in a condition “intermixed with much idle fiction, _equivocation_, and anachronism,”[519] was herein your guide! But the _manes_ of the Hyperboreans now speak from the tomb, and vindicate their _existence_ as well as their _locality_! I come now to prove this by another mode. Plato, in his _Cratylus_, represents Hermogenes as proposing several terms to Socrates for solution, when the following acknowledgment transpires:-- “I think,” says the philosopher, “that the Greeks, especially such of them as lived subject to the dominion of foreigners, adopted _many foreign words_; so that, if anyone should endeavour to resolve those words by reference to the _Greek language_, or to any other _than that from which the word_ was received, he must needs be involved in error!” The _foreign_ extraction, then, of _many_ of the Greek words being admitted, it devolves upon me to establish this extraction to be purely _Irish_.