The Picts—a Latin name for the first northern tribes whom the Romans distinguished from the Britons—called themselves _Cruithne_. Their earliest settlements in and near Britain appear to have been in the Orkneys, the north-east of Ireland, and the north of Scotland. They must then have made considerable advancement in the art of navigation. At the time of the Roman invasion, the southern Britons called the dwellers in the northern part of the island _Cavill daoin_, or “people of the woods,”—and thus the Romans named the district Caledonia. It has been surmised that the Picts of ancient Caledonia were a colony of Celtic- Germans; for such offshoots from the parent race occupied portions of central Europe. There was the same element of Druidism; but the Druids in Caledonia declined in influence and authority at an earlier date than did their brethren in Wales and South Britain. The bards took their place in preserving and handing down—orally and in verse—the traditions of their tribes—the heroism and virtues, the loves and adventures, of their ancestors. It may be noted that whilst in this early poetry the spirits of the dead are frequently introduced, and the powers of nature— sun, moon, and stars, the wind, the thunder, and the sea—are personified, there is no mythology,—no deities are called in to aid the heroes in battling with their foes. By the end of the Roman occupation, the Caledonian Picts had spread down east and central Scotland as far as Fife. And there are Pictish traces in Galloway on the west coast; probably a migration from Ireland. After the Romans left, the Picts, in their southern raids, so often crossed and made use of Hadrian’s wall, that the Romanized-Britons came to call it the Pictish wall. Their language was a dialect of Celtic, afterwards coalescing with, or being absorbed in, the Gaelic of the Scots, and which came to be the common tongue in the Highlands and western isles; but it was never a spoken tongue in the Scottish Lowlands.