Ossian Collection > Gaelic concepts of life and death

a tittle of the finest inheritance of any people
in Europe. If they part with their langu-
age, kilts and spoi-ans and plating and bag-
pipes will not save them from the contempt
which their folly merits and invites — although
when I say this I must yet say that the High-
land tartan dress is the most picturesque and
artistic dress in the world.
Let us put the matter in another way.
Suppose we had no tradition and no accumu-
lated inheritance of the natural observation
or of that wisdom and pfactical experience of
life which has come down to us from genera-
tions that were forgotten thousands of years
ago, what should we be worth? We should
be worth nothing at all. but what we could
in our own one short life realise. We should
stand in naked helplessness in the utter dark-
ness, cowed and amazed before the undeter-
mined forces of Nature, living in caves and
rock-shelters, making- more or less ingenious
war with wild beasts in order to live. But
now at the very day of our birth we are
the heirs of all the ages. It is as if our lives
were extended to 10,000 years instead of our
poor 70. Will you throw that away or any
part of it? We have no records of human
experience nor any stoi-ehouse of human wis-
dom that can at all be compared with langu-
age. It is the great and abiding Will and
Testament of the people of the past to their
children of the present time, and as far as we
are concerned in that Will and Testament
there is nothing which should be at all so
precious to us as the language of our in-
heritance and of our blood and being. It has
bequeathed to us the Duine-cbir, the Duinc-
foahainteach and the Ditin' -nasal and the
others, and an astonishment of delight and