410 RAMBLES OP A GEOLOGIST. 



Danish, spoke Scotch instead. Rather more than a mile to 

 the west of the fishing village of Avoch there commences a 

 Celtic district, which stretches on from Munlochy to the river 

 Nairne ; beyond which the Scandinavian and Teutonic-Scan- 

 dinavian border that fringes the eastern coast of Scotland 

 extends unbroken southwards through Moray, Banff, and 

 Aberdeen, on to Forfar, Fife, the Lothians, and the Mearns. 

 These two intercalated patches of Celtic people in the northern 

 tract, that extending from the Ord Hill to the Cromarty 

 Frith, and that extending from the Bay of Munlochy to the 

 Nairne, still retaining, as they do, after the lapse of ages, 

 a sharp distinctness of boundary in respect of language, cha- 

 racter, and personal appearance, are surely great curiosities. 

 The writer of these chapters was born on the extreme edge 

 of one of these patches, scarce a mile distant from a Gaelic- 

 speaking population ; and yet, though his humble ancestors 

 were located on the spot for centuries, he can find trace 

 among them of but one Celtic name ; and their language was 

 exclusively the Lowland Scotch. For many ages the two 

 races, like oil and water, refused to mix. 



I spent the evening very agreeably with one of the Free 

 Church elders of the place, Mr George Petrie, an accomplish- 

 ed antiquary ; and found that his love of the antique, joined 

 to an official connection with the county, had cast into his 

 keeping a number of curious old papers of the sixteenth, 

 seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, not in the least con- 

 nected, some of them, with the legal and civic records of the 

 place, but which had somehow stuck around these, in their 

 course of transmission from one age to another, as a float of 

 brushwood in a river occasionally brings down along with it, 

 entangled in its folds, uprooted plants and aquatic weeds, that 

 would otherwise have disappeared in the cataracts and eddies 

 of the upper reaches of the stream. Dead as they seemed, 

 spotted with mildew, and fretted by the moth, I found them 



