Notes on the Gatrail. By Miss Russell. 95 



garding the Picts as the old Gael of the country, who, within 

 historical times, occupied the whole country north of the Forth 

 and Galloway and Lothian ; that is, all Scotland except Cum- 

 bria ; and eventually became Scots in the ninth century, more 

 through a political change than anything else. The present 

 Lowland Scotch may have more Gaelic and Welsh blood than 

 has been generally supposed; it has only been fully demon- 

 strated of late years that all the Celts and Gauls known to anti- 

 quity were fair, and that the dark race of the western coasts 

 must be descendants of the Iberians or Basques, a few words of 

 whose language remain in the names of places. The two hill- 

 names of Pen-Christ and the Dun-Ian or Hill of St John, in 

 Eoxburghshire, show Welsh and Gaelic side by side in Christian 

 times. I mention these names only as a matter of local interest; 

 however speaking generally, the Gaelic theory of the Picts is the 

 only one which will really work at all in the east of Scotland ; if 

 they were either Goths or Cymri, the Gaelic names all over Fife 

 and Forfarshire are altogether unaccounted for ; the Scots (when 

 the dates are severely rectified) come in much too late and in too 

 small numbers to do it ; while south of the Forth, where Gaelic 

 names are tolerably numerous, especially in Lothian and Ber- 

 wickshire, they must have been left by the Picts or the Otadeni, 

 who appear to have been in reality the same people, though the 

 latter had probably left off tatooing under Eoman rule. Manau 

 Guotodin, apparently meaning Slamannan, was distinctly 

 peopled by the Picts down to comparatively late times ; and 

 Guotodin, as was recognised by the Welsh Stephens, is clearly 

 Otadeni with the Welsh digamma-, the incessant use of that 

 unsatisfactory element of speech is one of the diflGLculties of the 

 Celtic languages. (In ordinary Gaelic, words beginning with F 

 are classed with those beginning with vowels). The well-known 

 form Gododin appears to me to show that the names Gadeni and 

 Otadeni, which Ptolemy seems to use indifferently for the same 

 people, have been originally the same word ; the sound of broad 

 A comes very near to that of 0. And the form Gadeni suggests 

 further what the word was ; goddan means shrubbery in modern 

 Welsh, and goden is used for trees in the poems ; so I infer that 

 Godeni, or people of the woods, was what the Britons called the 

 inhabitants of Eoxburghshire, &c. And in this light the name 

 is nearly the equivalent of Caledonii, the people of the brown 

 wood, (descriptive of the native oak and hazel). The Welsh 



