of the shape of Britain, he says: “The island is a natural triangle, one side of which lies opposite Gaul; one angle, which is in the region of Cantium, at which almost all ships from Gaul put to land, faces east (quo fere omnes ex Gallia naves appelluntur, etc.).
By the time when Strabo wrote the tin trade had virtually ceased; and with it all trade with Western Britain, Devon, and Cornwall, would have fallen into decay. But we may infer from Cæsar’s expression, “almost all ships from Gaul”, that some few ships put in at some other part of Britain. Beside the passage across the Strait, there was also that from Armorica by the Channel Islands to the south coast, and there are various considerations which will make us regard the Isle of Wight as its terminus on the English side. We saw above that Diodorus, following Posidonius, gives Ictis as the name of the island on the coast of Britain to which the tin was brought. We also found that Timæus, probably from Pytheas, gives the name of the island where the tin was produced as Mictis, or rather Pliny, in his brief fashion, gives a reference to Timæus; for how far it represents the exact words of that author we have no means of judging. Now there can be no doubt that the Vectis (Wight) of the Romans, Ὄυηκτις of Ptolemy, Ἴκτις of Diodorus, are the same island, and we can hardly doubt that Pliny’s Mictis refers to the same spot, (whether the initial M be a genuine form of the word as it sounded to the ear of Pytheas, or, as some have suggested, a mere scribe’s blunder in the text of Pliny, the final m of the preceding insulam getting attached to the following Ictin.)[1] The similarity of form in local names is always of great weight, for the appellations of islands and rivers do not easily change. Thus, the Uxisana of Pytheas, the Uxantis of later writers, appears almost unchanged in the modern Ushant. The only difficulty in identifying Ictis with the Isle of Wight is the statement
- ↑ Such clerical blunders have given us two names of islands off our coasts—Hebrides, from older Ebrides, which was a misreading of Ebudes by Hector Boethius, and Iona, where the n is a mistake for u.
