identifying with Hercules, that is to say, so far as one may speak of identification at all in such a case. He was, you will remember, called Ogmios, and, according to Lucian's account of him, he was the personification of speech and all that conduced to make speech a powerful agency; but we found reasons for identifying him also with Hermes and Mercury, and moreover with the deo, qui vias et semitas commentus est. His counterpart in Irish was pointed out in that of Ogma (p. 17), the inventor of a kind of learned jargon and of a kind of writing, both of which were indifferently called ogam. On the other hand, the Welsh word corresponding etymologically to Ogmios and Ogma, is ovyᵭ, which has remained an appellative, meaning a leader or teacher (p. 17); and the Welsh and Irish accounts of the origin of writing are accordingly not the same. They may, however, be regarded as supplementing one another. Thus the term ogyrven for a letter of the alphabet connects writing with the terrene god, but without telling us through whose instrumentality the knowledge of the art of writing was first brought from him to man. The Irish legend, on the other hand, makes the divine ovyᵭ or Ogma the inventor of writing; but it does not let us into the secret of the origin of his knowledge, except indirectly by making him the son of Elatha king of the Fomori, or dwellers of the world beneath the sea; and to this placing of Gwydion over against Ogma as substantially the same person, the mythic pedigrees oppose no serious obstacle. For Gwydion is called son of Dôn, and her husband is inferred to have been Beli the Great, the god of death and darkness (pp. 90-1); so that here Beli fills the place ascribed in Irish to Elatha, and Dôn
