526 MAN : PAST AND PRESENT. [CHAP. 



first as allies against the Romans, and then as rivals for the 

 supremacy in North Britain, came later, and explains the presence 

 of Gaelic names in the Pictish Chronicle. This document, on 

 which so much has been built, is of Gaelic origin, and, as many of 

 the Pictish kings had Gaelic blood in their veins, it is not surprising 

 to find in the Pictish lists those Gaelic names on which are based 

 the views of Mr Skene and others regarding the Gaelic origin or 

 affinities of the Picts. In my opinion the Picts were Iberians 

 Aryanised either in Gaul or in Britain, not by Gaelic but by 

 Kymric Kelts, and this seems to be borne out by the local 

 geographical nomenclature, where the voicing of/ to ^, and other 

 phonetic changes, may perhaps be due to Iberian influences. 

 Thus of aber and the equivalent inver, a confluence, river-mouth, 

 or estuary, the former alone occurs in Wales, the latter alone in 

 Ireland 1 , but both somewhat irregularly and even confusedly in 

 Scotland 2 , showing the presence and intermingling here of the two 

 elements, as might be expected. But in Spain we have aber alone 

 (Iberus, Ebro\ and no inver ^ from which, if the equation be 

 allowed, it may be inferred that the Picts did not reach Ireland 

 at all, and were Aryanised by the British if the assimilation took 

 place after the migration from Gaul, and consequently that the 

 Keltic language spoken by them was not Gaelic, but Kymric some- 

 what modified phonetically in North Britain. 



This view accords completely with the anthropological and 

 archaeological data supplied by such authorities as Drs Beddoe 

 and Thurnam and Sir John Evans, and a-lso with the present 

 ethnical relations in the British Isles, as set forth by Prof. Ripley 3 . 

 Of these relations the most striking feature is the apparently 

 inexplicable uniformity in the shape of the head, which is every- 

 where rather long, more oval than round, with a 



Ethnic Re- 

 lations in mean cephalic index of about 78, but nowhere 



falling below 76 or rising above 79. This is the 

 more remarkable since Britain has been successively occupied by 



1 Isaac Taylor, Names and their Histories, 1896, p. 37. 



C. Elackie, A Dictionary of Place-Names^ 1887, p. 112, where it is 

 pointed out that inver is "found sometimes at the mouth and aber farther up 

 the same stream. Thus: Abergeldie and Invergeldie, Abernyte and Invernyte." 



3 Popular Science Monthly, Dec. 1897, p. 145 sq. 



