453 
Mr. Ramsay supposed ; or that the inscription was in any 
way imperfect, or originally connected with another on the 
same cross, now destroyed. Mr. Petrie further stated, that, 
having been kindly supplied with two rubbings of this in- 
scription, one from Mr. Chalmers of Auldbar, through his 
friend Mr. Worsaae, and the other from Mr. C. Innes, the 
able Secretary to the Royal Scottish Society of Antiquaries, 
he had given a good deal of attention to them, and had been 
so far successful as to read with certainty nearly one-half of it. 
As he still hoped, however, to be able to master the whole, 
and to present the results to the Academy, he would, on the 
present occasion, content himself with remarking, that the 
inscription was unquestionably one connected with the Pictish 
history ; and that, as might be expected in a country where 
the literature had been, confessedly, entirely in the hands of 
Irish ecclesiastics, the letters of which it was composed were 
wholly of that description usually called Jrish, though, in 
reality, only the corrupt form of the Roman alphabet, general 
in Europe during the fifth and some succeeding centuries. 
In proof of these conclusions he exhibited a tracing from 
the rubbing of the first line of the inscription (of which the 
following is a copy), and which plainly gives the name 
Drosten. 
mBnOmenN* 
_ This, Mr. Petrie remarked, was peculiarly a Pictish name, 
and was equally connected with the ecclesiastical as with the 
regal history of Scotland. It was a diminutive of the name 
_ Drust, so common in the list of the Pictish Kings, and was 
_ that of a Pictish ecclesiastic who flourished in the sixth century, 
~ and who was spoken of in St. Adamnan’s Life of St. Columba. 
