Why the Irish Like Green.
SOME old Greek traditions tell how Cadmus, a mighty leader and a very wise man in all the arts and sciences, came over from Asia and taught the Boeotians letters. In Phœnician the word Cadmus means the East-man, while the word Europe, which gradually was applied to a vast extent of land, a continent, at first belonged only to land just across from the island of Euboea, on the other side of the narrow strait called Euripus, and means in Phœnician, the West-land. So when you read of Cadmus coming to Europe, it is the East-man coming to the West-land. Over and over again in history we find names, to which all sorts of fanciful derivations have been given, and beautiful legends and myths have been attached, turning out to be the simplest kind of words. Thus, Ireland also means the West-land, and it comes from the Celtic word iar and our word land; iar meaning the west. Iar, before being used to denote the west, means the back, and that fact lets us into an important secret concerning the religion of the Celts, who first came over the Irish sea to the Emerald Island. It tells us that those early men named the points of the557compass according to the other directions when the observer faced toward the east. So the east was named from front, or forward, the west from back or behind, the north from left hand, and the south from right hand. That means that the early Celts worshiped the dawn and the sunrise. And so faithfully have the old traditions remained in men's minds in that big western island of the British Empire that, to this day, the emblem on the coat of arms of Ireland is a sunburst, or rising sun. Another curious thing is that it is more than probable that the Irish preference to the color green, for their flag and their sashes, arose from a mistake among those who had lost a thorough knowledge of the old Irish language. The sun, in Irish, is called by a word pronounced like our word “green”; and it is likely that the Irish fondness for that color arose from the word's exact likeness in sound to their word for the sun. In the same way, when we talk about green-houses, we think they are called so because the plants are kept green in them during winter. Yet it is far more probable that “green,” here, is the Irish word meaning, not the color, but the sun; because green-houses are built so as to catch the sun's rays and store them up when it is hidden by clouds, as happens more than half the time in showery Ireland.—From “Wonders of the Alphabet,” by Henry Eckford, in St. Nicholas for June.