suspicious circumstance in Pliny’s account is his reference to the serpent’s egg composed of snakes rolled together into a ball.  He states that he himself had seen such an ‘egg,’ of about the size of an apple.  Pliny, too, states that Tiberius Cæsar abolished by a decree of the Senate the Druids and the kind of seers and physicians the Gauls then had.  This statement, when read in its context, probably refers to the prohibition of human sacrifices.  The historian Suetonius, in his account

of the Emperor Claudius, also states that Augustus had prohibited ‘the religion of the Druids’ (which, he says, ‘was one of fearful savagery’) to Roman citizens, but that Claudius had entirely abolished it.  What is here also meant, in view of the description given of Druidism, is doubtless the abolishing of its human sacrifices.  In later Latin writers there are several references to Druidesses, but these were probably only sorceresses.  In Irish the name drúi (genitive druad) meant a magician, and the word derwydd in mediæval Welsh was especially used in reference to the vaticinations which were then popular in Wales.

When we analyse the testimony of ancient writers concerning the Druids, we see in the first place that to different minds the name connoted different things.  To Cæsar it is the general name for the non-military professional class, whether priests, seers, teachers, lawyers, or judges.  To others the Druids are pre-eminently the philosophers and teachers of the Gauls, and are distinguished from the seers designated vates.  To others again, such as Pliny, they were the priests of the oak-ritual, whence their name was derived.  In view of the variety of grades of civilisation then co-existing in Gaul and Britain, it is not

improbable that the development of the non-military professional class varied very considerably in different districts, and that all the aspects of Druidism which the ancient writers specify found their appropriate places in the social system of the Celts.  In Gaul and Britain, as elsewhere, the office of the primitive tribal medicine-man was capable of indefinite development, and all the forms of its evolution could not have proceeded pari passu where the sociological conditions found such scope for variation.  It may well be that the oak and mistletoe ceremonies, for example, lingered in remote agricultural districts long after they had ceased to interest men along the main routes of Celtic civilisation.  The bucolic mind does not readily abandon the practices of millennia.

In addition to the term Druid, we find in Aulus Hirtius’ continuation of Cæsar’s Gallic War (Bk. viii., c. xxxviii., 2), as well as on two inscriptions, one at Le-Puy-en-Velay (Dep. Haute-Loire), and the other at Mâcon (Dep. Saône-et-Loire), another priestly title, ‘gutuater.’  At Mâcon the office is that of a ‘gutuater Martis,’ but of its special features nothing is known.