1881. J Prof. Blacldc on the Language of the Scottish Highlands. 547 



WEEKLY EVENING MEETING, 

 Friday, April 29, 1881. 



Wahren De La Rue, Esq. D.C.L. F.R.S. Cor. Mem. Inst. France, &c. 

 Secretary and Vice-President, in tlie Chair. 



Professor J. Stuart Blaokie, F.R.S.E. 



The Language and Literature of the Scottish Highlands. 



Some fifty years ago Colonel Vane Kennedy, in a book of no vulgar 

 speculation and research, could make the assertion before the scholars 

 of Great Britain that the Celtic languages constitute a special family, 

 having no connection with any other known languages, specially 

 altogether distinct from Sanscrit, Latin, Greek, Teutonic, and other 

 members of the great Aryan class. At the present day there is not a 

 fairly instructed schoolboy in an ordinary English classical school 

 who is not familiar with the exact contrary of this proposition. That 

 such an assertion should have been made at all, admits of explanation 

 only from the general neglect of the Celtic languages by well- 

 educated British scholars, together with the crude state of arbitrary 

 divination, in the limbo of which even good })hilologers were in those 

 days blindly tossed about. Against tbis system of would-be scientific 

 conjecture as applied to the Celtic languages, Colonel Kennedy stoutly 

 and wisely protested ; but his own knowledge of Celtic, picked up 

 mainly from the dictionary, without any living knowledge either of 

 its babits or its anatomy, was altogether insuflicient to enable liim to 

 make a diagnosis of the language, that might furnish reliable materials 

 for a scientifically conducted induction. Such a diagnosis, thanks 

 to the labours of those " intellectual moles " and intellectual eagles, 

 the Germans, we are now in a condition, with the most perfect case 

 and with the most sure-footed safety, to conduct. My own acquaint- 

 ance with the Celtic languages is confined to that member of the family 

 spoken in the Highhmds of Scotland, commonly called Gaelic ; and 

 as it was an acquaintance which I made accidentally from sympathy 

 with the people among whom for a succession of summer seasons I 

 had pitched my tent, and followed out as a pleasant recreation rather 

 than a serious business, I cannot pretend, in addressing you, to speak 

 with the full weight of authority that would belong to the words of a 

 Zeuss, an Ebel, or a Windiscii. But I know enough of the general 

 principles of comparative pbilology, and enough also both of the 

 grammar and the living genius of the language as now spoken in the 

 Highlands, to keep me from falling into any serious blunder ; and I 

 appear here before you to-night, I presume, on the very practical and 

 profitable assumption that in a domain where everybody knows nothing, 



