4 SCIENTIFIC SURVEY OF ABERDEEN AND DISTRICT 
the whole of the North of Scotland, including the Hebrides and the 
Orkney and Shetland Islands. The University of Aberdeen has always 
drawn a considerable proportion of its students from Inverness-shire and 
Ross-shire, and this connection is further exemplified in the Aberdeen 
and North of Scotland College of Agriculture and in the Aberdeen Pro- 
vincial Committee for the Training of Teachers, both of which institutions, 
located in Aberdeen, have the North of Scotland, from Kincardine to 
Shetland, as their field. The shipping association between Aberdeen 
and Shetland is very close and the commercial links are further emphasised 
by the fact that the great herring fleets of the Aberdeenshire and Banff- 
shire ports, such as Peterhead, Fraserburgh, Macduff and Buckie, proceed 
to the Shetland fishing in the early summer before undertaking the July 
and August fishing at their home ports. 
The barrier of the Grampians, which begins on the sea coast immediately 
south of Aberdeen in a low range and which rises through various inter- 
vening heights to mountains as high as Lochnagar (3,786 ft.), has been 
an important factor in contributing to the distinctiveness of the North-east. 
It was known as The Month, from the Gaelic monadh, a heath—a term 
_ which still remains in certain place-names—and, though the effect of this 
barrier is now diminished under modern means of communication, it is 
still strong enough to influence the economic and cultural life of the region. 
On its western border the region shades imperceptibly into Moray and 
Nairn and the Highlands, while it has also to be remembered that the 
higher uplands of Aberdeenshire and Banffshire, where the Gaelic speech 
still lingers, fall within what is known as the Highland Line and partake 
in their physical structure of the Highlands rather than the Lowlands. It 
isimpossible to enter here into the details of racial origins—a fuller discussion 
of which, as of other points, will be found in subsequent pages—but it is 
reasonably correct to say that, while ethnically there is a large Celtic 
element in the population of the North-east, the region belongs culturally: 
to the Anglo-Saxon Lowlands with a Norse or Danish strain along the 
coast. 
The trading community at the mouth of the river Dee, which formed 
in time the town of Aberdeen, seems to have been, from the earliest 
historical days, English-speaking. What became known as Old Aberdeen 
was the burgh which grew up round the cathedral founded on the banks of 
the Don on the site of the missionary church traditionally ascribed to 
St. Machar, a disciple of Columba. The establishment of a university 
by Bishop Elphinstone in 1494 increased the academic as well as the 
ecclesiastical importance of Old Aberdeen, and the burgh, though now 
merged municipally in Aberdeen, still retains in its buildings and environs 
a distinct old-world aspect. While Old Aberdeen had its University and 
King’s College, Aberdeen had its University and Marischal College, 
founded in 1593, and it was not until 1860 that the two universities were 
fused in one. ‘The existence side by side for two and a half centuries of 
two separate and rival universities, while not without its absurd features, 
reflected in a sense the consuming passion for education which marks out 
the people of the North-east even in Scotland, and the influence of which 
is to be seen in so many directions in their aims and outlook. 
