deities, both male and female, will not be discussed. Attention will be directed only to the Celtic goddesses in the various districts from which evidence concerning them has come down to us. It may here be stated at the outset that there are great gaps in the available evidence concerning the goddesses in question; for example, our information from the western part of Gaul is extremely slight, while from the district of the Pyrenees, though the names of gods abound, practically no names of individual goddesses have survived. These facts will become clearer, when we take the various inscriptional zones in order, as follows: (1) The Pyrenees, (2) Gaul south of Lyons, (3) Gaul between Lyons and the lower Rhine, (4) other districts of Transalpine Gaul, (5) Cisalpine Gaul, (6) Britain, (7) Noricum and the Celtic zone of the Danube.
1. The Pyrenees district.—The only goddesses with a distinctive name known from inscriptions in this district are the Niskai of the Amélie-les-Bains tablets in the Pyrénées Orientales in the ancient territory of the Sordones. These tablets are eight in number, and were found by CoL A. Puiggari in 1845. They were unfortunately lost in 1849, but a copy of them had been made by their discoverer. The curious reader will see an account of them in Nicholson’s Keltic Researches (p. 154), together with a very ingenious attempt at their interpretation. Some of the words, such as kantamus, rogamus, sanate, omnes, non, amiki, illius, quidquid, si, are clearly Latin, but there are other words which are apparently in some form of Celtic speech. One of these words, peisqi, raises problems similar to those raised by the Coligny Calendar and the Rom tablets. Mr. Nicholson’s identification of Niskas with the root contained in the English ‘nixies’ = water-sprites, following as it does the word kantamus, is not at all improbable. The river-name Vernodubrum from this district is undoubtedly Celtic, but the names Iliberris and Caucoliberris seem to be of a non-Celtic form. It may be noted further that, in the territory of the Sordones, we are not far from the district of Southern France, where grouped goddesses are frequent, the nearest to the Sordones being the
