Blair Collection > Critical dissertations on the origin, antiquities, language, government, manners, and religion, of the antient Caledonians, their posterity the Picts, and the British and Irish Scots

PREFACE. xxi
South, were not conclufive arguments. Thefe
circumftances might depend more upon food
and the peculiar nature of the foil and cli-
mate, than upon a different origin. The
manifeft difference in thofe dialeds of the
Celtic, which the Scots of the mountains
and the WeKh fpeak to this day, feems
more to argue their remote feparation from
one another. Their living as feparate flates,
from the earliefl times, could not 'have
effedluated fuch a change : othervvife we can-
not account for the identity of the Irilh and
Galic tongues, efpecially as the nations who
fpeak thofe languages were in no period of
antiquity that can be affigned, fubjedt to
the fame government.
This was one of the arguments that
mufl have influenced the judgment of the
author of the Differtations in his firft view
of the fubjed. But this difference of lan-
guage is eafily accounted for. The little
progrefs that navigation mufl have made in
the North of Europe when Britain was firfl
peopled, is a convincing argument, that the
firfl migrations into this ifland, was from
the nearell continent, which was the Bel-
gic divifion of Gaul. Thefe migrations
certainly happened in the eariiefl ftage of
fociety. The fubiiflence of a colony of fa-
b 3 vages