Did the Norwegian colonists eventually go off in vapour, leaving behind them only a native residuum speaking a purely Celtic dialect freed from all taint of the Northman’s language after the close contact of so many centuries? If the Norwegian element was not so sublimated, but as Pinkerton affirms, and which I believe, continues in the modern population of those portions of the United Kingdom, what becomes of the purity of the so-called “Primitive Celtic tongue”? Assuming that it was Celts among whom the Norwegians settled, is it possible to conceive that men of such force of character as the Northmen made no lasting impression on the speech of the wretched Celtic inhabitants whom they trampled under foot? Despite the researches of philologers is it rational to conclude that what is now called Celtic can on any intelligible hypothesis be the primeval speech of the unlettered savages who before the advent of the Romans had been driven into the western portion of the Island by the Belgae? “It is not in nature,” the _Saturday Reviewer_ says, “that people should accept Mr. Roger’s or Pinkerton’s opinion in preference to the universally held belief that the Celtic speech is a language of the Indo-European family of speech,” &c. But it is not alone Mr. Roger and Pinkerton with whom the _Reviewer_ has to deal. The late Lord Neaves, an eminent Scotch judge and antiquary, held an opinion very much akin to that of Pinkerton, that the Erse, and Gaelic, and Manx dialects, if not entirely a form of obsolete Gothic speech, contain at least a very large admixture of the northern tongue. The editor of the _Athenæum_ too, in reviewing Skene’s _Highlanders of Scotland_, draws attention to the fact of the striking resemblance between the oldest Erse monuments and those dialects confessedly Teutonic, holding this decisive of the question that the _Scots_ were Germans. On the same side of the question is the strongly expressed opinion of the late Dr. R. Angus Smith, F.R.S. “I consider,” he says, “those who hold the nations called Celtic and those called Teutonic, as one race, to be simply abolishing the knowledge we get from history, and refusing to look at very clear facts.” I am not however going to quarrel with the _Saturday Reviewer_, who virtually concedes all for which I contend, that the Celts were entirely without art or culture, of which more hereafter. On the question of civilizing influences we have the testimony of Professor Kirkpatrick, of the Scotch Bar, a gentleman of well-known scholarly accomplishments, who occupies the Chair of Constitutional Law and History in the University of Edinburgh. “I have long been of opinion,” he writes, “that we owe the _whole_ of our civilization to Scandinavian and Teutonic ancestors, and partly to Roman influence, and your very interesting volume confirms that opinion.” There is still another phase of the question with which the philological critic has to deal, and this is,