Blair Collection > Vestigia celtica

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Nature, precede any satisfactory culture of
the further field of Grammatical Inflection.
Between us and this distal field of gram-
matical inflection, the philological instinct,
it appears to me, has always been feeling
for a proximal field of less enigmatical
research ; a field in turning over whose less
tenacious furrows one might expect to light
on some fragments of linguistic pottery,
which, pieced together, might form the
perfect moulds of inflectional forms now so
time-worn as to be unintelligible. And if
ever this hypothetical home-field of philo-
logy is to become a fertile reality, I con-
fidently expect that it will be found, not in
any dead language like the highly elaborated
Sanskrit, but in the rude, unelaborated
forms of the living Celtic. Nay, I propose
now to show that in the current Scotch
Gaelic of the Highlands such a field is
already open to the philologist, and that
too in a state, not merely of wonderful
preservation, but of singular freshness and
rich recuperative vitality. What is here
pointed at, be it observed, is not the old