Aberdonians are credited with a distinct individuality, partly the result of race, partly due to environment. The strain of practicality in the Teuton toned down the Celtic imagination and warmth of feeling, and added a certain tincture of the phlegmatic such as is so prominent in the Dutchman. Hence the cautious “canny” nature of the typical Aberdonian, dreading innovations, resisting agricultural novelties, and disliking ecclesiastical changes. They have been described as people Who are not fond of innovations, Nor covet much new reformations; They are not for new paths but rather Each one jogs after his old father. This requires some elucidation. They are far from slothful or indifferent. They will uphold with zeal the cause they think right, but they must first reach assured conviction that it _is_ right. They are not swift nor slow to change, but firm. The Celtic population was in fact absorbed, as we have said, but a certain contingent betook themselves to the mountains and for long kept up a warfare of reprisals upon those who had dispossessed them. This caused no end of trouble in Aberdeenshire but not without its uses for it braced the occupants in the arts of defence and made them alert and courageous. No less potent a factor in the evolution of the Aberdonian has been his struggle with a well-nigh irreclaimable soil. The county is without mineral wealth, and the only outlet for his energy was found in attacking the boulder-strewn moors and in clearing them for the plough. To this he set his mind in the eighteenth century with grim determination. Small farmers and crofters by dint of great personal toil and life-long self-sacrifice transformed stony tracts of poor and apparently worthless land into smiling and productive fields. It is this struggle with a malignant soil, more than anything else, that has made the Aberdonian; one triumph led on to another, and to-day the spirit of enterprise in farming is nowhere more pronounced than in this difficult county. The place names are almost entirely Celtic, and even when they appear to be Saxon they are only Gaelic mispronounced or assimilated to something better known. The parish of King Edward might very plausibly be referred to the northern visits paid by the Hammer of the Scots, but it is really Kinedar, with the Gaelic _Kin_ (seen in Kinnaird, Kintore and Malcolm Canmore), meaning a head. The county has a distinctive dialect, really imported and originally uniform with the dialect of the Mearns, and of Northumbria, the dialect spoken at one time all the way from Forth to Humber. To-day it is called the Buchan Doric and though varying somewhat in different parts of the county and hardly intelligible in the Highlands of Braemar, where Gaelic still survives, it is a Teutonic speech with a thin tincture of Gaelic words such as _bourach_, _closach_, _clachan_, _brochan_, etc.