[44] Highlanders, vol. i. p. 72.
[45] Garnett’s Philological Essays, p. 199.
[46] Adam. ap. Colganum, 1. ii. c. 32.
[47] On the subject in question the recently published Book of Deer cannot be said to afford us any information. It gives a short account of the landing of Columba and a companion at Aberdour in the north of Aberdeenshire, and the founding of a monastery at Deer. But although the entries are in Gaelic, they do not tell us what language Columba spoke, nor whether ‘Bede the Pict,’ the mormaer of Buchan, understood him without an interpreter. The name of the saint—Drostan—whom Columba left behind him to prosecute the work, is Pictish, at any rate not Irish, so that nothing can be inferred from this. Since much of the first part of this book was written, Mr. Skene has advanced the theory, founded partly on four new Pictish words he has managed to discover, that the language of the Picts was neither pure Gaelic nor Cymric, ‘but a sort of low Gaelic dialect partaking largely of Welsh forms.’ This theory is not new, but was distinctly put forth by Dr. Maclauchlan some years ago in his able and learned work, The Early Scottish Church, p. 29: if true, it would certainly satisfy a great many of the demands which any hypothesis on the subject must do.
[48] Bede’s Eccles. Hist., Book 1. c. i.
[49] Nennius 12, Vatican MS.
[50] Critical Essay on Scotland, vol. i. p. 68.
[51] Book i., c. 12.
[52] Inquiry into the Hist. of Scot., vol. i. p. 357, ed. 1814.
[53] Crit. Essay, vol. i. p. 75.