The Highlanders of Scotland - Clan Strachan Society

THE
HIGHLANDERS OF SCOTLAND.
CHAPTER I.
The Original Colonization of Britain—The Picts and Caledonians
PROVED TO BE THE SAME PEOPLE—THE DALRIADIC
Scots an Irish Colony of the Sixth Century.
Colonization The original colonization of Britain, as of most
of Britain.
countries, is involved in considerable obscurity ; but
although this obscurity arises in some degree from the distance
of time to which we must look back, and the scanty materials
which have corne down to us, yet much of the uncertainty
which has hitherto invested the subject, and of the controver-
sies to which that uncertainty has necessarily given rise, is to
be attributed to the want of a proper discrimination of the
authorities for the early history of Britain. It is not unusual
to find, even in writers of the present day, authors of the third
and of the thirteenth centuries quoted as of equal authority,,
and equal reliance apparently placed upon their statements ;
while, on the other hand, we see others wholly neglect the
authentic historians, and build their theories upon the monkish
fables of the middle ages. The authorities upon
for the early wliich the gcnuino history of Scotland is princi-
pally grounded may, with a view to the reliance
which we ought to place upon them, and their importance for
the earlier history, be divided into three classes. Of these the
A