At the time the independent tribes of the north are thus described as consisting of two nations—the ‘Caledonii’ and the ‘Mæatæ’—it is recorded of them, as a characteristic feature, that they retained the custom of painting their bodies, by puncturing with iron the figures of animals on their skin; and when the inhabitants of these northern regions next appear on the scene after the interval of nearly a century, we find the whole aggregate of these tribes bearing the general name of ‘Picti.’ This name, afterwards so well known and so much dreaded, first appears as their designation after the fall of the insular empire of Carausius and Allectus, in whose armies they seem to have been largely enrolled. They are said at this time to have consisted of the ‘Caledones and other Picts.’ Fifty years later, when the first of those great and systematic irruptions into the province by the simultaneous action of several barbarian nations burst forth, the ‘Picti’ are more accurately described by the historian as now consisting of two nations—the ‘Dicaledonæ’ and the ‘Vecturiones;’ while the occupation of the Roman territory nearest them during the first four years, brought to their assistance, in their more extended attack upon the Roman province, a part of its population under the new designation of the ‘Attacotti.’ We thus see that prior to the extension of the Roman province under Antoninus, the people known to the Romans by report as the Caledonian Britons, and described by Tacitus as a distinct people under the designation of inhabitants of Caledonia, consisted of fourteen independent tribes; that a part of the largest of the southern tribes having been cut off from the rest by the Roman wall, the tribes remaining independent combined into two nations—the ‘Caledonii’ and ‘Mæatæ;’ that the Mæatæ having to cede a part of their territory, the remainder of the nation lose that name and appear under that of ‘Vecturiones,’ the ‘Caledonii’ or ‘Caledones’ being now termed ‘Dicaledonæ,’ inhabiting the north-western regions bounded by the Deucaledonian sea, while the combined nation bore the name of ‘Picti.’ Such seems the natural inference from the successive notices of the northern tribes by the Roman historians; and while they give no hint that they did not consider them the same people throughout, and while the identity of the northern division at all times is sufficiently manifest by the preservation of the name of Caledonians under analogous forms, the poets clearly indicate that they considered the Picts the indigenous inhabitants of Caledonia; for while they consider ‘Ierne’ or Ireland as the home of the Scots, and the ‘Orcades’ or Orkneys as the position from whence the Saxons issued on their expeditions, they assign to the Picts, as their original seat, the same ‘Thule’ which the earlier poets had applied as a poetical name for Caledonia, and the home of the Caledonian Britons.