When we turn to the classical writers we find that under the name of the Picts they clearly understood that aggregate of tribes who, throughout the entire occupation of the provinces of Britain by the Romans, were known to them as the Barbarians who dwelt beyond the northern wall—those ancient enemies of the Romans who had so frequently harassed them in the quiet possession of Britain. From the beginning of the third century the older names by which many of the barbarian tribes beyond the frontiers of the Empire had been known to the Romans appear to have given way to new appellations, embracing a larger combination of tribes; and as in Germany the new generic names of ‘Alamanni,’ ‘Franci,’ ‘Thuringi,’ and ‘Saxones’ now appear, the constituent elements of which combinations can be identified with the tribes bearing the older names, so at the same period the name of ‘Picti’ appears as a designation of the barbaric tribes in Britain. It is first mentioned by Eumenius the panegyrist in the year 296. As the Picts seemed at first destined to carry off the prize, and, although eventually obliged to confine themselves to their ancient limits, formed the groundwork of the future kingdom of Celtic Scotland, it will be necessary, with a view to the main object before us, to trace their characteristics with somewhat more minuteness of detail. When Agricola first penetrated beyond the Solway Firth, and extended his conquests over a hitherto unknown country as far as the Tay, his biographer records the tribes he encountered as new nations, and in his general description of the inhabitants of the island he discriminates between the tribes whom Agricola first made known to the Romans, and whom he calls inhabitants of Caledonia, and the rest of the Britons. That they were the same people who had been known to the Romans by a report not long before as ‘Caledonii Britanni’ there can be little doubt. They possessed, it is true, no diversity of language or of manners sufficient to attract the attention of the Roman historian; but still there were some distinctive features which led him to consider them as not identic with the provincial Britons, and to give that part of the island occupied by them a separate name. There was one physical mark of difference that at once attracted his observation. They were larger in body and limb, and less xanthous.