In the Lowlands, pen, law, fell, bræ, hope, rise, edge, indicate similar varieties. Among these pen, as distinguished from the northern ben, evidently points to a Welsh original. Hope is a curious word, which a south-country gentleman once defined to me as “the point of the low land mounting the hill whence the top can be seen.” Of course, if this be true, it means an elevation not very far removed from the level ground, because, as every hill-climber knows, the top of a huge eminence ceases to be visible the moment you get beyond what the Greeks call the “fore-feet” of the mountain.

In the designation of the intervening hollows, or low land, the variety of expression is naturally less striking. Glen serves for almost all varieties of a narrow Highland valley. A very narrow rent or fissured gorge is called a glachd. The English word dale, in Gaelic dail, means in that language simply a field, or flat stretch of land at the bottom of the hills. It is to be noted, however, that this word is both Celtic and Teutonic; but, in topographical etymology, with a difference distinctly indicative of a twofold origin. In an inland locality where the Scandinavians never penetrated, Dal is always prefixed to the other element of the designation, as in Dalwhinnie, Dalnacardoch, and Dalnaspidal, the field of meeting, the field of the smithy, and the field of the hospital, all in succession within a short distance on the road between the Spey uplands and Blair Athol. On the other hand, a postfixed dale, as in Borrowdale, Easdale, and not a few others, indicates a Saxon or Norse origin. The word den or dean, as in the Dean Bridge, Edinburgh, and the Den Burn, Aberdeen, is Anglo-Saxon denn, and appears in the English Tenterden, and some others. Another Celtic name for field is ach, the Latin ag-er, which appears in a number of Highland places, as in Ach-na-cloiche (stone field), in Argyleshire. A hollow surrounded by mountains is called by the well-known name of LAGGAN, which is properly a diminutive from lag, in Greek λάκκος, in Latin lacus, a hollow filled with water, and in German a mere loch, or hole, into which a mouse might creep. A special kind of hollow, lying between the outstretched arms of a big Ben, and opening at one end into the vale below, is called in Gaelic coire, literally a cauldron—a word which the genius of Walter Scott has made a permanent possession of the English language. In England such mountain hollows are often denominated combs, as in Addiscombe, Ashcomb, a venerable old British word of uncorrupted Cornish descent, and which, so far as I know, does not appear in Scottish topography, unless it be in Cummertrees (on the shore, traigh), near Annan, and Cumbernauld; but this I am not able to verify by local knowledge. The word cumar appears in O’Reilly’s Irish dictionary as “the bed of a large river or a narrow sea, a hollow generally,” but seems quite obsolete in the spoken Gaelic of to-day. The termination holm is well-known both in English and Scotch names, and proclaims itself as characteristically Scandinavian, in the beautiful metropolis of the Swedes. In Gaelic districts a holm, that is, a low watery meadow, is generally called a lon, a word which has retained its place in Scotch as loan—Loaning, Loanhead, Loanend, and is fundamentally identical with the English lane and lawn. The varieties of sea-coast are expressed by the words traigh, cladach, camus, corran, wick, loch, rutha, ross, caolas, stron, salen, among which, in passing, we may specially note camus, from the root cam, Greek κάμπτω, to bend: hence Morecambe Bay, near Lancaster, signifies the great bend; corran, a scythe, evidently allied to the Latin curvus, and used in the Highlands to denote any crescent-shaped shore, as at Corranferry, Ardgour, in Lochfinne; wick, a familiar Scandinavian word signifying a bay, and which, with the Gaelic article prefixed, seems to have blundered itself into NIGG at Aberdeen, and near Fearn in Ross-shire; caolas, a strait, combining etymologically the very distant and very different localities of Calais and Ballachulish; stron or sron, a nose, which lends its name to a parish near the end of Loch Sunart, in Morvern, and thence to a famous mineral found in its vicinity; lastly, salen is nothing but salt, and appears in the south of Ireland and the north-west of Scotland, under the slightly varied forms of Kinsale and Kintail, both of which words signify the head of the salt water; for Irish and Gaelic are only one language with a slightly different spelling here and there, and a sprinkling of peculiar words now and then.

The only other features of natural scenery that play a noticeable part in topographical etymology are the rivers, lakes, wells, and waterfalls; and they need not detain us long. The Gaelic uisge, water, of which the Latin aqua is an abraded form, appears in the names of Scottish rivers as Esk, and of Welsh rivers as Usc. The familiar English Avon is the Gaelic amhainn, evidently softened down by aspiration from the Latin amnis. This avon often appears at the end of river names curtailed, as in Garonne, the rough river, from the Gaelic root garbh, rough. The Don, so common as a river name from the Black Sea to Aberdeen, means either the deep river or the brown river. A small river, brook in English, gives name to not a few places and persons. In the Scottish Highlands, and in those parts of the Lowlands originally inhabited by the Celtic race, the word alt performs the same functions. Loch, in Gaelic, answering to the English mere (Latin mare), appears most commonly in the Highlands, as Kinloch, i.e. the town or house at the head of the lake; and tobar, a well, frequently, as in Holywell, connected with a certain religious sanctity, appears in Tobermory, i.e. the well of the Virgin Mary, one of the most beautiful quiet bits of bay scenery in Great Britain. Of places named from waterfalls (eas, from esk), a significant element in Highland scenery, Inverness, and Moness near Aberfeldy, are the most notable, the one signifying “the town at the bottom of the river, which flows from the lake where there is the great waterfall,” i.e. Foyers; and the other, “the waterfall of the moorish uplands,” which every one understands who walks up to it.

So much for the features of unappropriated nature, stereotyped, as it were, at once and for ever, in the old names of local scenery. But as into a landscape an artist will inoculate his sentiment and symbolise his fancy, so on the face of the earth men are fond to stamp the trace of their habitation and their history. Under this influence the nomenclature of topography becomes at once changed from a picture of natural scenery to a record of human fortunes. And in this department it is plain that the less varied and striking the features of nature, the greater the necessity of marking places by the artificial differentiation produced by the presence of human dwellings. Hence, in the flat, monotonous plains of North Germany, the abundance of places ending in hausen and heim, which are only the Saxon forms of our English house and home. Of the termination hausen, Sachsenhausen, the home of the Saxons, and Frankenhausen, the home of the Franks, are amongst the most notable examples. Heim is pleasantly associated with refreshing draughts in Hochheim, i.e. high home, on the north bank of the Rhine a little below Mainz, whence a sharp, clear wine being imported, with the loss of the second syllable, and the transformation of ch into k, produced the familiar hock. This heim in a thousand places of England becomes ham, but in Scotland, where the Celtic element prevails, appears only rarely in the south-east and near the English border, as in Coldingham and Ednam—the birthplace of the poet Thomson—contracted from Edenham. Another root very widely expressive of human habitation, under the varying forms of beth, bo, and by, is scattered freely from the banks of Jordan to the islands of the Hebrides in the north-west of Scotland. First under this head we have the great army of Hebrew beths, not a few of which are familiar to our ear from the cherished teachings of early childhood, as—Bethabara, the house of the ferry; Bethany, the house of dates; Bethaven, the house of naughtiness; Bethcar, the house of lambs; Bethdagon, the house of the fish-god Dagon; Bethel, the house of God; Bethshemesh, the house of the sun (like the Greek Heliopolis); and a score of others. Bo is the strictly Danish form of the root, at least in the dictionary, where the verb boe, to dwell, also appears. Examples of this are found in Skibo, in Ross-shire, and Buness, at the extreme end of Unst, the seat of the Edmonstones, a family well known in the annals of Shetland literature; but more generally, in practice, it takes the softened form of by, as in hundreds of local designations in England, specially in Lincolnshire, where the Danes were for a long time at home. Near the English border, as in Lockerby, this same termination appears; otherwise in Scotland it is rare. In the Sclavonic towns of Mecklenburg and Prussia, it takes the form of bus, as in Pybus, while in Cornish it is bos, which is a later form of bod (German bude, English booth, Scotch bothy), which stands out prominently in Bodmin and other towns, not only in Cornwall, but in Wales. The termination bus appears likewise in not a few local designations in the island of Islay, where the Danes had many settlements. In Skye it appears as bost, as in Skeabost, one of the oldest seats of the Macdonalds. The other Saxon or Scandinavian terms frequently met with throughout England and in the north-east of Scotland are—ton, setter or ster, stead, stow, stoke, hay, park, worth, bury, thorp, toft, thwaite. In Germany, besides heim and hausen, as already mentioned, we have the English hay, under the form hagen, a fence; and thorp under the form dorf, a village; and worth under the forms worth and werth, which are merely variations of the Greek χόρτος, English yard, and the Sclavonic gard and gorod, and the Celtic garad, the familiar word in the Highlands for a stone wall or dyke. In Germany, also, weiler, from weilen, to dwell, and leben, to live, are thickly sprinkled; hof, also, is extremely common, signifying a court or yard—a suffix which the French, in that part of Germany which they stole from the Empire, turned into court or ville, as in Thionville from Diedenhofen.

So much for the Teutonic part of this branch of topographical designation. In the Highlands tigh and bail are the commonest words to denote a human dwelling, the one manifestly an aspirated form of the Latin tignum (Greek στἐγος, German dach), and the other as plainly identical with the πόλις which appears in Sebastopol, and not a few cities, both ancient and modern, where Greek influence or Greek affectation prevailed. With regard to bal, it is noticeable that in Ireland it generally takes the form of bally, which is the full form of the word in Gaelic also, baile, there being no final mute vowels in that language; but in composition for topographical use final e is dropped, as in Balmoral, the majestic town or house, from morail, magnificent, a very apt designation for a royal residence, by whatever prophetic charm it came to be so named before her present Majesty learned the healthy habit of breathing pure Highland air amid the fragrant birches and clear waters of Deeside. Tigh, though less common than bal, is not at all unfrequent in the mountains; and tourists in the West Highlands are sure to encounter two of the most notable between Loch Lomond and Oban. The first, Tyndrum, the house on the ridge, at the point where the ascent ceases as you cross from Killin to Dalmally; and the other Taynuilt, or the house of the brook, in Scotch burnhouse, beyond Ben Cruachan, where the road begins to wend through the rich old copsewood towards Oban. I remember also a curious instance of the word tigh in a local designation, half-way between Inveraray and Loch Awe. In that district a little farmhouse on the right of the road is called Tighnafead, i.e. whistle-house (fead, a whistle, Latin fides), which set my philological fancy immediately on the imagination that this exposed place was so called from some peculiar whistling of the blast down from the hills immediately behind; but such imaginations are very unsafe; for the fact turned out to be, if somewhat less poetical, certainly much more comfortable, that this house of call, in times within memory, stood at a greater distance from the road than it now does, which caused the traveller, when he came down the descent on a cold night, sharp-set for a glass of strong whisky, to make his presence and his wish known by a shrill whistle across the hollow.

So much for tigh. The only other remark that I would make here is, that the word clachan, so well known from Scott’s Clachan of Aberfoyle, does not properly mean a village, as Lowlanders are apt to imagine, but only a churchyard, or, by metonymy, a church—as the common phrase used by the natives, Di domhnaich dol do’n chlachan, “going to church on Sunday,” sufficiently proves—the word properly meaning only the stones in the churchyard, which mark the resting-place of the dead; and if the word is ever used for a village, it is only by transference to signify the village in which the parish church is, and the parish churchyard.

But it is not only the dwellings of men, but their actions, that make places interesting; and as the march of events in great historical movements generally follows the march of armies, it follows that camps and battle-fields and military settlements will naturally have left strong traces in the topography of every country where human beings dwell. And accordingly we find that the chester and the caster, added as a generic term to so many English towns, are simply the sites of ancient Roman castra or camps; while Cologne, on the Rhine, marks one of the most prosperous of their settlements in Germany. Curiously analogous to this is the Cöln, a well-known quarter of Berlin, on the Spree, where the German emperors first planted a Teutonic colony in the midst of a Sclavonic population. In the solemn march of Ossianic poetry, the word blar generally signifies a field of battle; but, as this word properly signifies only a large field or open space, we have no right to say that such names as Blair Athol and Blairgowrie have anything to do with the memory of sanguinary collisions. Alexandria, in Egypt, is one of the few remaining places of note that took their name from the brilliant Macedonian Helleniser of the East. Alexandria, in the vale of Leven, in Dumbartonshire, tells of the family of Smollett, well known in the annals of Scottish literary genius, and still, by their residence, adding a grace to one of the most beautiful districts of lake scenery in the world. Adrianople stereotypes the memory of one of the most notable of the Roman emperors, who deemed it his privilege and pleasure to visit the extremest limits of his vast dominions, and leave some beneficial traces of his kingship there. The name Petersburg, whose Teutonic character it is impossible to ignore, indicates the civilisation of a Sclavonic country by an emperor whose early training was received from a people of German blood and breed; while Constantinople recalls the momentous change which took place in the centre of gravity of the European world, when the declining empire of the Roman Cæsars was about to become Greek in its principal site, as it had long been in its dominant culture. The streets of great cities, as one may see prominently in Paris, in their designations often contain a register of the most striking events of their national history. Genuine names of streets in old cities are a historical growth and an anecdotal record, which only require the pen of a cunning writer to make them as attractive as a good novel. London, in this view, is particularly interesting; and Emerson, I recollect, in his book, How the Great City grew (London, 1862), tells an amusing story about the great fire in London, which certain pious persons observed to have commenced at a street called Pudding Lane, and ended at a place called Pye Corner, in memory of which they caused the figure of a fat boy to be put up at Smithfield, with the inscription on his stomach, “This boy is in memory put up for the late fire of London, occasioned by the sin of gluttony, 1666.” Many a dark and odorous close in Old Edinburgh also, to men who, like the late Robert Chambers, could read stones with knowing eyes, is eloquent with those tales of Celtic adventure and Saxon determination which make the history of Scotland so full of dramatic interest; while, on the other hand, the flunkeyism of the persons who, to tickle the lowest type of aristocratic snobbery, baptized certain streets of New Edinburgh with Buckingham Terrace, Belgrave Crescent, Grosvenor Street, and such like apish mimicry of metropolitan West Endism, stinks in the nostrils and requires no comment. But not only to grimy streets of reeking towns, but to the broad track of the march of the great lines of the earth’s surface, there is attached a nomenclature which tells the history of the adventurous captain, or the courageous commander, who first redeemed these regions from the dim limbo of the unknown, and brought them into the distinct arena of cognisable and manageable facts. In the frosty bounds of the far North-West, the names of Mackenzie, Maclintock, and Maclure proclaim the heroic daring that belongs so characteristically to the Celtic blood in Scotland. But it is in the moral triumphs of religion, which works by faith in what is noble, love of what is good, and reverence for what is great, that the influence of history over topographical nomenclature is most largely traced. In ancient Greece, the genial piety which worshipped its fairest Avatar in the favourite sun-god Apollo, stamped its devotion on the name of Apollonia, on the Ionian Sea, and other towns whose name was legion. In Cornwall, almost every parish is named after some saintly apostle, who, in days of savage wildness and wastefulness, had brought light and peace and humanity into these remote regions. In the Highlands of Scotland, the Kilbrides (kill from cella, a shrine), Kilmartins, Kilmarnocks, and Kilmallies everywhere attest the grateful piety of the forefathers of the Celtic race in days which, if more dark, were certainly not more cold than the times in which we now live. In the Orkneys the civilising influence of the clergy, or, in some cases, no doubt, their love for pious seclusion, is frequently marked by the Papas or priests’ islands. In Germany, Munich or Monacum, which shows a monk in its coat-of-arms, has retained to the present day the zeal for sacerdotal sanctitude from which it took its name; and the same must be said of Muenster, in Westphalia (from μοναστῆρι, in modern Greek a cathedral, English minster), the metropolis of Ultramontane polity and priestly pretension in Northern Germany.

But it is not only in commemorating, like coins, special historical events, that local names act as an important adjunct to written records; they give likewise the clue to great ethnological facts and movements of which written history preserves no trace. In this respect topographical etymology presents a striking analogy to geology; for, as the science of the constitution of the earth’s crust reveals a fossilised history of life in significant succession, long antecedent to the earliest action of the human mind on the objects of terrestrial nature, so the science of language to the practised eye discloses a succession of races in regions where no other sign of their existence remains. If it were doubted, for instance, whether at any period the Lowlands of Scotland had been possessed by a Celtic race, and asserted roundly that from the earliest times the plains had been inhabited by a people of Teutonic blood, and only the mountain district to the west and north-west was the stronghold of the Celt, the obvious names of not a few localities in the east and south-east of Scotland would present an impassable bar to the acceptance of any such dogma. One striking instance of this occurs in Haddingtonshire, where a parish is now called Garavalt—by the very same appellation as a well-known waterfall near Braemar, in the hunting forest of the late Prince Consort; and with the same propriety in both cases, for the word in Gaelic signifies a rough brook, and such a brook is the most striking characteristic of both districts. Cases of this kind clearly indicate the vanishing of an original Celtic people from districts now essentially Teutonic both in speech and character. The presence of a great Sclavonic people in Northern Germany, and of an extensive Sclavonic immigration into Greece in mediæval times, is attested with the amplest certitude in the same way. A regular fringe of Scandinavian names along the north and north-west coast of Scotland would, to the present hour, attest most indubitably the fact of a Norse dominion in those quarters operating for centuries, even had Haco and the battle of Largs been swept altogether from the record of history and from the living tradition of the people. To every man who has been in Norway, Laxfiord, in West Ross-shire, a stream well known to salmon-fishers, carries this Scandinavian story on its face; and no man who has walked the streets of Copenhagen will have any difficulty, when he sails into the beautiful bay of Portree, in knowing the meaning of the great cliff called the Storr, which he sees along the coast a little towards the north; for this means simply the great cliff, storr being the familiar Danish for great, as mor is the Gaelic. Ethnological maps may in this way be constructed exactly in the same fashion as geological; and the sketch of one such for Great Britain the reader will find in Mr. Taylor’s well-known work on Names and Places.

With regard to the law of succession in these ethnological strata, as indicated by topographical nomenclature, the following three propositions may be safely laid down:—1. The names of great objects of natural scenery, particularly of mountains and rivers, will generally be significant in the language of the people who were the original inhabitants of the country. 2. Names of places in the most open and accessible districts of a country will be older than similar names in parts which are more difficult of access; but—3, these very places being most exposed to foreign invasion, are apt to invite an adventurous enemy, whose settlement in the conquered country is generally accompanied with a partial, sometimes with a very considerable, change of local nomenclature.