THE RACES OF THE SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS. (To THE EDITOR or
THE " SPECTATOR.") Sin,—Your readers at present are evidently a good deal interested in the races which have inhabited Britain, and especially Scotland. May I be allowed a few remarks on the most recent correspondence? He who signs himself "A Reader of the Spectator " is, I am afraid, mistaken in what he says about Argyll as " always the great link of union " between Scotland and Ireland, as shown by its very derivation Oirer Gael, "Eastern Gaels." Scholars to-day do not favour the derivation of oirer, or rather oirir, from Gaelic oir, "the East." It means rather " border or frontier land," from oir " border edge," "margo Scottorum," as one old writer has it. This is confirmed by the fact that to-day Gaels call Argyll Earaghaideal, " boundary, limit or division of the Gael," from earn, " end, extremity, boundary." All this indicates Argyll not as link but as furthest limit of the Gael in Scotland.
What Mr. Miller says about the intermixture of Gael and Norsemen in the North and West of Scotland is quite correct. He does not refer to that much-disputed race, the Picts. Mr. Thomson seems to think that old Pinkerton's theory that the Picts were Goths from Scandinavia still can hold its own. Pinkerton may have been a very learned man in his day, but his theory that the Picts had a Gothic or any kind of Teutonic origin is now dead as a door nail, and has long been so. Phil- ologists are now fully agreed that the Picts were Celts, and that they belonged to the p and not the k group thereof, i.e., they were, so far as the very scanty evidence shows, nearer to the Cornish and Welsh in speech than to the Scottish and Irish Gaels. Mr. Miller speaks as if there were no doubt that Gaelic was once spoken in Orkney and Shetland. Of that there is no surviving proof. The fairly numerous place-names in Orkney once claimed as Gaelic can now all be shown to have a Norse origin. There is no sure exception left. And it is probable that a Norse speech prevailed in the Northern Isles much further back even than the "thousand years" of which Mr. Miller speaks. But, for all that, it is more than likely that a Celtic tongue was originally spoken there, and that the Pictish. The name Pentland Frith is sufficient proof that the Picts were once up there. The Norse sagas call it Pentlands, i.e., Pictlands, fjord, and they tell that the Norsemen learned this name from the natives. The name of the Pict also survives in such place- names as Pettawater and Pettidale (Detting) and Pettasmog (Unst), all in Shetland. But of his language the Northern Isles now yield no trace.—I am, Sir, &c., JAMES B. Joassros.
St. Andrew's Manse, Falkirk.
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