of their own for gold, may have adopted a Phoenician name, because they obtained the fine-wrought ornaments of that metal which they prized so highly from the Semite traders.
If any one thinks that this is a mere suggestion unsupported by analogy, my answer is not far to seek. The Albanian word for gold is [Albanian: **][1], so called because the first coined gold moneys of the middle ages with which they became acquainted were those of Florence. Now I think Dr Schrader will hardly maintain that the Albanians were unacquainted with gold as a metal until sometime in the mediaeval period they first obtained it from the Florentines. What took place in the case of the Albanians may have taken place again and again at earlier periods. A rude nation already acquainted with a certain metal receives by trade from a more advanced people the same metal wrought into various shapes and forms for personal decoration or use, and along with the superior articles it takes over the name by which the makers of those objects of metal described them.
These considerations well serve to show how unsafe is the basis afforded by Linguistic Palaeontology alone on which to build any theory of ethnical development. Let us now take another case where Schrader and his followers dogmatize without the slightest suspicion that the facts of recorded history may step in and rudely upset their conclusions. Schrader[2] holds that the Kelts were not acquainted with gold until their invasion of Italy in the beginning of the 4th cent. B.C. His argument is that the Celtic word for gold (Irish or, Cymric awr) is a loan-word from the Latin aurum. As the Sabine form of the latter is ausum, and the change of s to r did not take place in Latin until the fifth century B.C., and as the change of primitive s into r does not take place in the Keltic languages, he infers that it was only after the change in the form of the word had taken place in Latin that the Gauls became acquainted with the metal. Yet who will, on reflection, maintain that the Gauls had not already learned the use of gold from the Etruscans with whom they had been in con-*
