Note 1616 — THE ETHNOLOGY OF ANCIENT BRITAIN

He tells us (Monthly Review, Jan., 1901, pp. 139-40) that ‘the early Gaelic chroniclers assert that the Gaels were preceded in Scotland and Ireland by two races’ [the Picts and the Dananns]. ‘Of them too,’ he adds, ‘it is said that they lived in hidden habitations, that they also persecuted the newer race.’ In other words, the ‘mound-folk’ who, according to Professor Rhys, were ‘slaves and drudges’ of the neolithic race, were themselves persecutors of the Celts. That the Picts, or some of them, lived in ‘hidden habitations’ I am not concerned to deny; as for the ‘Dananns’ of Irish legend, I would ask Mr. MacRitchie to read what Professor Rhys (Celtic Heathendom, p. 119) has written about them. ‘The earliest Scottish writer, so far as I am aware,’ continues Mr. MacRitchie (Monthly Review, Jan., 1901, p. 141), ‘who speaks of the Picts as a small race living underground was a fifteenth-century Bishop of Orkney, Thomas Tulloch.... Tulloch compiled a Latin account of Orkney (De Orcadibus Insulis) ... and therein he states that the Picts inhabiting those islands ... in the ninth century were “not much bigger than pigmies in stature”, and that ... they occasionally took refuge “in little houses underground”’. The work of Tulloch, or rather Tullock, is not mentioned in the catalogue of the British Museum; and I cannot verify Mr. MacRitchie’s quotation. But is the statement of a fifteenth-century compiler about the stature of a people who lived in the ninth century to be taken seriously as evidence? And if so, what does it prove about the Picts as a whole? What more does it prove than this,—that in a remote group of islands there were dwarfish people who were included under the name ‘Picts’,—a name which of course denoted not a race but a heterogeneous population, comprising people whom the physical anthropologist would classify under several heads?