ON

VARIOUS SUBJECTS,

PHILOLOGICAL, PHILOSOPHICAL, ETHNOLOGICAL,

AND ARCHÆOLOGICAL,

CONNECTED WITH

THE PREHISTORICAL RECORDS

OF

THE CIVILIZED NATIONS OF ANCIENT EUROPE, ESPECIALLY OF

THAT RACE WHICH FIRST OCCUPIED GREAT BRITAIN.

BY

JOHN WILLIAMS, A.M., OXON.,

ARCHDEACON OF CARDIGAN;

Author of “Homerus," " Gomer," and of the Lives of Julius Cæsar, and Alexander

the Great, &c. &c.

LONDON : F. PICKTON, PRINTER, Perry's Place, 29, Oxford Street.

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

PAOB

1

On Carn Goch, in Caermarthenshire

On the Early Intercourse between the Eastern and Western World, and

on Celtic Coins

11

On One Source of the Non-Hellenic Portion of the Latin Language 47

The Virgilian Cosmogony

111

On the Aristotelian Expression, "META TA QYSIKA"

135

A Selection from certain Archæological Papers, written by the Arch-

deacon of Cardigan

149

Extracts from Archæological Letters of the Archdeacon of Cardigan . 187

Extract from an Unpublished Archæological Paper

195

On the Megalitbic Structures in Auvergne

201

Primitive Tradition. A Letter to the Editor of the Edinburgh Revier 215

The Antiquity of Celtic Coins

285

A few Observations on certain very Ancient Traditions among certain

Primitive Nations

307

The Ancient Phænicians and their Language

315

The Written Records of the Cumri

343

On the Difference between the Cumraeg and the Gaeleg

361

On the Great Ethnological Theory.

365

On the Antiquity of certain Welsh Manuscripts

369

PREFACE.

Having just published a volume of discourses “On the Unity of God's Will as revealed in Scripture; and on the Necessity laid upon all Christian Communities of acknowledging such Will as the only Rule of Life, with special Reference to God's Dealings with Christianized Britain," I publish the several papers contained in the present volume, as embodying my views of the non-scriptural evidence of the same truths, as deducible from documents and monuments, both historical and prehistorical, which I have had an opportunity of examining. In the dedication to the Lord Bishop of London of the above-mentioned volume, I have given the following statement of my views upon the subject :

“I hold that the first man, as an intellectual, moral, and spiritual being, had nothing to learn from experience; that, as a labourer in the struggle against matter, he had almost everything to learn; and that the triumphs of man over the material world, and which are daily in a greater or less degree obtained, will never give him, individually, more intellectual, moral, and spiritual knowledge, than was possessed by the first Adam; that a school opposite to mine expects new teaching to be discovered on this same field from modern experience; and that the spirit of the age is indeed a light