INTRODUCTORY NOTICE.

HE aborigines of Scotland were clans of the same Gaelic

TH

origin as those who in early ages settled in England, and at

the time of the Roman invasion under Agricola, they were in a similar condition to those of England. Scotland, from the Tweed and Eden on the south, to the Pentland Firth on the north, was divided among twenty-one tribes. Those on the east coast, owing to the greater fertility of the soil and drier climate, were more numerous and powerful than those on the west coast; but all of them, in accordance with Celtic customs, were independent of one another, and only co-operated under pressure of outward danger. Of these, the Vacomagi occupied the country from the Deveron on the east to the Beauly river on the west, comprehending Banffshire, Elginshire, Nairnshire, and the eastern portion of Inverness-shire, or the territories on the south of the Moray Firth or Sinus Vararis of the Romans. Their towns were:-Ptoroton, the Alata Castra of Ptolemy, now Burghead; Tuessis-Old Fochabers on the Spey; and Tamia, supposed to be Cullen; and Banatia, supposed to be Banff. The Vacomagi were so denominated because they occupied these shores, from the old British word, Vac, a bay or firth-a word which runs through all the branches of the Aryan languages: Sanscrit, veça; Greek, oikos;

Polish, wies; Irish, fich; Welsh, quic; Gaelic, uig; and also the British word, magh, a plain. This is a root of great antiquity, and in the Latinised form, magus, is frequently used in the ancient place names of Gaul, as Caesar-o-magus, Drus-o-magus, Novi-omagus, and Rigio-magus.

These tribes appear to have been little raised, at the time when history introduces them to our notice, above the condition of savages, but they were brave, alert, and had remarkable powers of enduring fatigue, cold, and famine, and Dio tells us they were literal democrats, acting as clans, and adopting any public measure only by common consent. Their vessels consisted of currachs or coracles-boats made of twigs and covered with skins. Thus they were until the year 140 A.D., when Lollius Urbicus was deputed to reduce them to obedience to Rome. It is said he reduced the country up to the Beauly Firth, the district from which southward to the Wall of Antoninus he called Vespasiana. In the year 306, while still under Roman influence, we find a new native name other than Britons given to the inhabitants of Scotland. Irish history informs us that the "Picts" were driven out of that country by the brave Milesians, when they took ships to Cruithan-tuath, the old name for Scotland, and that their leader, Cathluan, obtained the sovereignty of the country, and was the first monarch of a long line of seventy kings. We can only accept this as a mere conjecture, as there is little doubt that the Picts were no other than a part of the race of ancient Caledonians under another name. Little is known of Pictish history for more than a hundred years after the Romans finally surrendered Britain, further than that some old chronicles give a list of the Pictish kings. By the accession of Bredi, the thirteenth king, in 586, to the Pictish throne, some light is let in on the darkness which

surrounded the history of previous kings by his conversion to Christianity. He not only was converted himself, but was the means of making his people embrace the same faith. This, though proud of his many victories, was his greatest glory. The battles of the Pictish kings were with the Scoto-Irish from Dalriada, but the greatest of all was that fought at Dun-Nechtan, in Aberdeenshire, in 685, between a later Bredi and Egfrid, one of the Saxon princes of Northumbria, who crossed Bernicia, or river Forth, penetrated through the defiles of Perth and Aberdeen, until his career was ended by his annihilation at Dun-Nechtan, now Dunnichen, where he and the majority of his soldiers fell. In 710 the Picts were finally defeated by the Saxons, who returned to the conquest under a new leader.

Up to this period the pirate or Vikingr of the northern seas confined his ravages to the countries south of the Baltic, but in 787 he appeared on the northern shores of England, and a few years after on the Caledonian shores. But it was not until 839 and following years that he entered the territory of the Pictish king, along the Moray Firth, where murderous conflicts between the fierce Norsemen, on the one hand, and Uen, the son of Ungus, and Bran, his brother, on the other, took place, with fatal results to the Picts. These events hastened the downfall of the Pictish monarchy. The Scottish king, Kenneth, carried into execution, in the year 843, the project he had long entertained of uniting the Scots and Picts, and placing both crowns on one head. For long after the union of the two crowns, the two races were recognised as distinct people, until in the 12th century they lost their characteristic distinctions by amalgamation with their conquerors. They were races of common origin and cognate speech, consequently they coalesced the more easily. The union increased

the power of both, and by the ascendancy of the Scots, their name was given to the whole of the northern part of Britain. The Scottish period extended from this union in 843 till the death of Donald Bane in 1097. During this period the Gaelic Scots predominated, and their language, being the same as that of the Picts, was universal throughout the country. From 1097 to 1306 a new people appears, " a new dynasty ascended the throne, a new jurisprudence generally prevailed, new ecclesiastical establishments were settled, and new manners and a new speech overspread the land." The fusion of the Celtic and Saxon races was a social conquest, and its results were to almost suppress the Celtic tongue and Celtic manners, or imprison them within the fastnesses of the Highlands.

It is now generally acknowledged that the Celts originally came from the East. They were, undoubtedly, the primitive inhabitants of Gaul, Belgium, and the British Isles, and their history has to be built up of the fragments we find scattered here and there in the form of ancient tradition, the discoveries of the spade and pick-axe, and above all by the traces of their original language found in the etymology of the names still attached to places, and monuments of undoubted Celtic origin. We find the primæval names given to places in our own country in the original language appearing through the subsequent strata laid in various times, and the variations of spelling from the original root which have followed. Mallet says "All Celtic nations have been accustomed to the worship of the sun" whose name in the Sanskrit, Hebrew, Greek, Norse, and Celtic languages is frequently met with. Laertius places the Druids of ancient Britain on an equality with the Chaldeans, and the Magi of Persia in point of learning and literature. Hence we may at once dispel the idea

are

that names were given to the hills, rivers, and fields in a haphazard manner, or that the mass of our place-names derived from the Saxon speech. It is evident from Ptolemy's Geography of Britain, and from the Itinerary of Antoninus, that many places bore Celtic names merely altered by Latin terminations and English garb. We find a good example of this in the name Ptoroton, or now Burghead, which before the circumnavigation of Britain by the Romans was Tor-an-duin, the fort on the headland; Ben Cruachan was Pen-o-Crucium. From these and many other examples that might be given there are strong grounds for believing that the great majority of the place names were given by its earliest occupants, handed down to us with the alterations introduced by writing and spelling which have, more than anything, changed and obscured the original term, but, notwithstanding, are still capable of being traced back to their original etymon. This involves labour, and the surest way in which it can be done is by finding out the primary orthography from which alone can the signification of a word be even approximately determined. In Scotland, and particularly throughout the county of Elgin, a large number of names can be interpreted as they are found by any one acquainted with the laws of transmutation of words. Elginshire names present many peculiarities, and have to be traced to the original through the three strata of English, Norse, and finally Gaelic. In their present form they are to be regarded from the phonetic standpoint, having been put down as they had been spoken, not as written in the original, and are in consequence materially corrupted. They are therefore of some importance from an ethnological as well as from a philological point of view.

The ethnology of the ancient Britons has given rise to so much