Ae a 
De ot : : sai 
aj 
Botany of the Borders. 329 
If we agree in acknowledging that the poet hath well 
said— 3 
: “ It is the soul of man, with its hopes and its dreams, 
Which lights up all Nature with living gleams ;” 
if we would endeavour to master the purpose for which this 
work was planned, and to comprehend the spirit in which it has 
been executed, it may be useful to inquire into the origin of 
the inhabitants of the district, and the more striking changes’ 
which have occurred in their social condition. 
- Previous to the Roman Conquest in A.D. 80, little was 
known of the history, civil or religious polity, of the race ; no 
sculptured stones or storied bricks have ever been found; 
nothing but weapons of stone, of bronze, and, lastly, of iron, 
remain to attest the slow progress of a rude people towards 
a higher stage of civilization in the arts relating to the chase 
and to war. Roman chroniclers inform us that the original 
inhabitants belonged to the Celtic race, and that they were 
divided into various independent tribes, each governed by an 
hereditary chieftain. This peculiar institution flourished 
along the Scottish Border for centuries after the race had 
succumbed before the Saxon colonists, and long after these, 
in other districts, had bowed their sturdy necks to the feudal 
laws of the haughty Normans. After the withdrawal of the 
Roman legions in A.D. 426, the incipient civilization of the 
Romanised Britons disappeared before the incursions of the 
unconquered tribes of the North, and these in their turn 
gave way to the influx of Saxon colonists in 449. arly in 
the seventh century the land was subdivided and populous; 
but in the following century, and down till 934, all this fair 
prosperity was blasted by the incursions of the ferocious 
Danes ; a proportion of the latter amalgamated with the in- 
habitants ; at a later period a few Norman chiefs appeared ; 
and thus the Borderers by descent are pre-eminently a mixed 
people. The Tweed and the Cheviot Hills were constituted 
political boundaries in 1018, when the Earl of Northumber- 
land ceded Berwickshire to Malcolm II. of Scotland. During 
that and the following century considerable progress was made 
in civilization ; but the long and bloody wars attending the 
disputed succession to the Scottish throne gave an impetus 
