How many people, in their inmost souls, wish to be considered prophets! Andrew Lang, in his “History of Scotland,” calls attention to that “wisdom after the event,” which is so often exhibited, not only by the commonplace person, who loves to be an incarnate “I told you so,” but even by those who pose as genuine prophets. To such, the map of Scotland seems in part a foreshadowing of her history. One thinks of the Highlands as an extension northeastwardly of the older Scotia, or Ireland, or as but the island itself moved diagonally or in the direction named. Draw a line reaching from Dumbarton, on the Clyde, to Stonehaven, on the German Ocean, and you have, on the north and west, Celtic Scotland. Here, for the most part, are ranges of mountains, lines of hills, and the great waterway from southwest to northeast. In the extreme north, however, in Sutherland and Caithness, both upraised land and flowing water seem, for the most part, to run from south to north. In other words, one would suppose from the map that the people dwelling on the rather flat lowlands would be of one race and with one kind of civilization, while the inhabitants of the hills would greatly differ. In the Highlands, defence would be easy and offence would be hard, strongholds would be more numerous, general communication impracticable, social improvement slow, and common feeling with the Lowlanders be a long time coming. The Celtic clansmen of the hills, usually living and dying in the same glen, were not famed as travellers. “All travel has its advantages,” says Dr. Johnson. “If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own, and if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.” So wrote Dr. Samuel Johnson, in his “Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland.” That famous book gave most Englishmen their first idea of the region which is now a summer annex to England--enormous tracts of the Highlands being in latter days the property of English landlords. Yet, while it is true that the map might lead an observer to anticipate that the later comers, of Germanic race and speech, would dispossess the Celts and form a kingdom separate from and hostile to theirs,--with no union until six hundred years had passed by,--we may ask another question. What is there, in Scottish topography, that would be a prophecy of the northern half of the British Isles separating into a Scottish nation apart from England?