FOOTNOTES:
[400] With Ecne may be connoted ech, the Irish for horse.
[401] Irish Myth. Cycle, p. 82.
[402] Germania, x.
[403] “The senses of the horse are acute though many animals excel it in this respect, but its faculties of observation and memory are both very highly developed. A place once visited or a road once traversed seems never to be forgotten, and many are the cases in which men have owed life and safety to these faculties in their beasts of burden. Even when untrained it is very intelligent: horses left out in winter will scrape away the snow to get at the vegetation beneath it, which cattle are never observed to do.”—Chambers’s Encyclopædia, v., 792.
[404] Bayley, H., The Lost Language of Symbolism, vol. ii. Cf. chapter, “The White Horse”.
[405] Nauticaa Mediterranea, Rome, 1601.
[406] Brock, M., The Cross: Heathen and Christian, p. 64.
[407] “The oak, tallest and fairest of the wood, was the symbol of Jupiter. The manner in which the principal tree in the grove was consecrated and ordained to be the symbol of Jupiter was as follows: The Druids, with the general consent of the whole order, and all the neighbourhood pitched upon the most beautiful tree, cut off all its side branches and then joined two of them to the highest part of the trunk, so that they extended themselves on either side like the arms of a man, making in the whole the shape of a cross. Above the insertions of these branches and below, they inscribed in the bark of the tree the word Thau, by which they meant God. On the right arm was inscribed Hesus, on the left Belenus, and on the middle of the trunk Tharamus.”—Quoted by Borlase in Cornwall from “the learned Schedius”.
[408] Ancient British Coins, p. 49.