Note 19 — Chapter XII · Race in Folklore and Myth

The neo-Celtic nations of these islands consist, speaking roughly, of a mixture of the invading Celts with the earlier inhabitants whom the Celts found in possession. These two or more groups of peoples may have been in very different stages of civilization when they first came in contact with one another. They agreed doubtless in many things, and perhaps, among others, in cherishing an inherited reluctance to disclose their names, but the Celts as Aryans were never without the decimal system of counting. Like the French, the Celtic nations of the present day show a tendency, more or less marked, to go further and count by scores instead of by tens. But the Welsh are alone among them in having, in certain instances, gone back from counting by tens to counting by fives, which they do when they count between 10 and 20: for 16, 17, 18, and 19 are in Welsh 1 on 15, 2 on 15, 3 on 15, and 4 on 15 respectively; and similarly with 13 and 1419. We have seen how the lake fairy reckoned by fives (pp. 8, 418) all the live stock she was to have as her dowry; and one otherwise notices that the fairies deal invariably in the simplest of numbers. Thus if you wish, for example, to find a person who has been led away by them, ten to one you have to go ‘this day next year’ to the spot where he disappeared. Except in the case of the alluring light of the full moon, it is out of the question to reckon months or weeks, though it is needless to say that to reckon the year correctly would have been in point of fact far more difficult; but nothing sounds simpler than ‘this day next year.’ In that simple arithmetic of the fairies, then, we seem to have a trace of a non-Aryan race, that is to say, probably of some early inhabitants of these islands.