59 
I tUii iiulcbted to !Mr. Jaines Macplicrsoii, of Edinbnrgli, a 
■\ allied corrosjiondont, who has most ungrudgingly assisted me in 
in(|uiries into the correct topography of many localities in the 
Highlands, for the following analysis of the names of the several 
islands of the group, which I think cannot fail to prove interesting 
in this place. 
THE SlIIANT ISLES. 
“ Skumt- Seim (to bless ; to make tlie sign' of the cross ; anc. Sen) is con- 
nected with Ger. serjuen (to bless), seryen (the sign of the cross, prayer, 
charm). A. S. segen, segn (blessing, benediction ; given by making the 
sign of the cross). Lat. signum (mark, sign). I'l.vo. sign. 
Seunta (pronounced Sh6nta) adj. and pret. part, of the foregoing verb 
seun ; blessed. Eileanan seunta = The Blessed Islands. From which 
Ihe ‘ Shiant,' or Holy, Islands of geographers.” 
I he above is, almost without doubt, the correct philology, and is that 
given by the Rev. A. Cameron, of Brodick, Arran, in liis “Notes on Gaelic 
1 hilolop m a Gaelic Magazine, ‘ The Gael.’ Mr. Cameron is one of the 
best— if not indeed the best — Gaelic scholars living. 
Mr. Maepherson writes Tlie natives when at a distance probably always 
thought and spoke of the group collectively as one island, although when on 
them, or in their neighbourhood, they might have distinguished them in a 
vague way as, The Large Island and The Small Island.” This is doubtless 
what caused Martin to write, “Siant, or as the natives call it Island More.” 
In further proof of this, Christopher Irvine in his ‘ Scottish Nomenclature ’ 
(1682-p. 16d of New Edition, 1819) has, “ Seuna Magna, and Seuna Parva 
are a larger and less island of that name, that border on the island of the 
Lewes and Ilarrise,” which names were almost certainly applied to what arc 
now called The Shiant Isles. 
Lord Teignniouth gives Shiant Isles-‘The Isle of Enchantment,’ 
Ihe Fairy Isles, ” which reading is also a correct rendering of the 
Islands, or groups of islands, lying at considerable distances from land, 
very often obtained the name of “sacred” or holy from a superstitious 
regard on the part of the natives in early times. Martin says (p. 19) he 
asked one of tlie natives of Lewis who had been in the Flannen Islands the 
preceding year, “if he prayed at home as often and as fervently as he did 
when in the Flannen Islands, and he plainly confessed to me, that he did 
not, addiwj further that these remote (isolated) isl<mds were places of 
inherent sanctity, and that there was none yet ever landed in them but 
