pressure of the Teutonic movement; and, like the German, to have shown a twofold minor difference, produced by the same physical influence, which is known by the names of "high" and "low" German.

The platform occupied by the Pictish people was not confined to Scotland alone, for they certainly extended over part of the north of Ireland, and formed, in all probability, an earlier population of the north half of Ireland, which became subjugated by the Scots. On the other hand, the Scots at an early period occupied the district of Argyll. In the north of Ireland and the west of Scotland the Picts must, at an early period, have become blended with the Scots, and their form of the Gaelic assimilated to the Scottish. In Scotland, south of the Tay, where they occupied the districts from the Tay to the Forth, the region of Manau or Manann, and Galloway, they came in contact with the Cymric people, and the one being a low Gaelic dialect, and the other a low Cymric dialect, their forms must have so far resembled each other as to lead to an admixture presenting that mixed language of low Gaelic with Cymric forms, known to Bede as the Pictish language.

CHAPTER IX.

THE CELTIC TOPOGRAPHY OF SCOTLAND, AND THE DIALECTIC DIFFERENCES INDICATED BY IT.

THE etymology of the names of places in a country is either a very important element in fixing the ethnology of its inhabitants, or it is a snare and a delusion, just according as the subject is treated. When such names are analysed according to fixed laws, based upon sound philological principles and a comprehensive observation of facts, they afford results both important and trustworthy; but if treated empirically, and founded upon resemblance of sounds alone, they become a mere field for wild conjectures and fanciful etymologies, leading to no certain results. The latter is the ordinary process to which they are subjected. The natural tendency of the human mind is to a mere phonetic etymology of names, both of persons and of places, in which the sounds of the name of the place appear to resemble the sounds in certain words of a certain language, the language from which the etymology is derived being selected upon no sound philological grounds, but from arbitrary considerations merely.

Unhappily, an etymology founded upon mere resemblance of sounds has hitherto characterised all

systematic attempts to analyse the topography of Scotland, and to deduce ethnologic results from it. Prior to the publication of the Statistical Account of Scotland in 1792, it may be said that no general attempt had been made to explain the meaning of the names of places in Scotland, or to indicate the language from which they were derived. We find occasionally, in old lives of the saints and in charters connected with church lands, that names of places occurring in them are explained; and these interpretations are very valuable, as indicating what may be termed the common tradition of their meaning and. derivation at an early period. Of very different value are a few similar derivations in the fabulous histories of Boece, Buchanan, and John Major, which are usually mere fanciful conjectures of pedantry.

The first impetus to anything like a general etymologising of Scottish topography was given when Sir John Sinclair projected the Statistical Account of Scotland. In the schedule of questions which he issued in 1790 to the clergy of the Church of Scotland, the first two questions were as follows:

1. What is the ancient and modern name of the

parish?

2. What is the origin and etymology of the name? This set every minister thinking what was the meaning of the name of his parish. The publication of the Poems of Ossian; and the controversy which followed, had tended greatly to identify national feeling and the history of the country with Gaelic

literature and language, and, with few exceptions, the etymology was sought for in that language. The usual formula of reply was, "The name of this parish is derived from the Gaelic," and then followed a Gaelic sentence resembling in sound the name of the parish, and supposed admirably to express its characteristics, though the unfortunate minister is often obliged to confess that the parish is remarkably free from the characteristics expressed by the Gaelic derivation of its name. These etymologies are usually suggested irrespective entirely of any known facts as to the history or population of the parish, and are purely phonetic.

After the publication of the Statistical Account, Gaelic was in the ascendant as the source of all Scottish etymologies, till the publication of Chalmers' Caledonia in 1807. John Pinkerton had indeed tried to direct the current of popular etymology into a Teutonic channel, but his attempts to find a meaning in Gothic dialects for words plainly Celtic were so unsuccessful that he failed even to gain a hearing. Chalmers was more fortunate. His theory was that a large proportion of the names of places in Scotland are to be derived from the Welsh, and indicate an original Cymric population. And this he has worked out with much labour and pains. In doing so, he was the first to attempt to show evidence of the dialectic difference between Welsh and Gaelic pervading the names of places, and to discriminate between them; but for almost all the names of places in the Lowlands of

Scotland he furnishes a Welsh etymology, which, like his predecessors the Scottish clergy, he supposes to be expressive of the characteristics of the locality. His theory has, in the main, commanded the assent of subsequent writers, and is usually assumed to be, on the whole, a correct representation of the state of the fact. Yet his system was as purely one of a phonetic etymology, founded upon mere resemblance of sounds, as those of his predecessors. The MSS. left by George Chalmers show how he set about preparing his etymologies, and we now know the process he went through. He had himself no knowledge of either branch of the Celtic language, but he sent his list of names to Dr. Owen Pughe; and that most ingenious of all Welsh lexicographers, who was capable of reducing every word in every known language in the world to a Welsh original, sent him a list of Welsh renderings of each word, varying from twelve to eighteen in number, out of which Chalmers selected the one which seemed to him most promising. His other etymologies are equally founded on a mere resemblance of sounds between the modern form of the word and the modern Welsh, as those of the clergy in the Statistical Account were between the modern form of the word and the modern Gaelic.

That system of interpreting the names of places, which I have called phonetic etymology, is, however, utterly unsound. It can lead only to fanciful renderings, and is incapable of yielding any results that are either certain or important. Names of places are, in