His object was, by identifying this range with the boundary between the Picts and Scots, to extend the territories of the latter, and by applying to it the name of Tacitus’s Mons Grampius he has stamped upon it ever since the appellation of the Grampians. But the older authorities know nothing of the Grampians, and never mention this range of mountains. They only specify the mountain ranges of the Mounth and Drumalban. Thus the Tract de Situ Albaniae (_Chron. Picts and Scots_, p. 135) mentions the ‘mons qui Mound vocatur, qui a mari occidentali usque ad mare orientale extenditur.’ And another description (_ib._ p. 214) has, ‘Et itaque est quoddam vastum quod vocatur le Mounth, ubi est pessimum passagium sine cibo, longitudinis lx. leucarum et latitudinis xvi. leucarum.’ The other range is frequently mentioned by Adamnan in the seventh century as ‘Dorsum Britanniae,’ and once as ‘Dorsi montes Britannici, quos Pictos et Scotos utrosque disterminant.’ The oldest of the Latin chronicles mention Fergus, the first king of Dalriada, as reigning ‘a monte Drumalban usque ad mare Hiberniae’ (_ib._ p. 130); and the Tract de Situ Albaniae mentions the ‘montes qui dividunt Scotiam ab Arregaithel.’ As this chain was the great boundary which originally separated the Picts from the Scots of Dalriada, it is essential to a clear understanding of the early history that its real position should not be mistaken, and it is only necessary to examine the passages in which it occurs to see that it was used with precision, and to identify the mountain chain which was meant by it. Much confusion, however, has been thrown into early Scottish history by the loose and arbitrary way in which this name has been applied by modern writers to any great mountain chain which they fancied might represent it, arising merely from a want of accurate acquaintance with the true character of the mountain system of Scotland, and a careless use of authorities. Of modern historians Pinkerton alone has rightly placed the name of Drumalban on the ridge which separates Argyllshire from Perthshire. Mr. Cosmo Innes, in the map in his _Scotland in the Middle Ages_, places it upon the great range of the Mounth, in which he is followed by Mr. E. W. Robertson, in his _Scotland under her Early Kings_; and Mr. Burton has made confusion worse confounded by identifying it with “the range now called the Grampians” (_Hist._ vol. i. p. 15); in this following Boece. Fordun gives an elaborate description of it in his _Chronicle_, B. ii. c. 7; and Buchanan rightly describes it as the highest part of Breadalban, and clearly indicates it as the ridge separating the east from the west waters, ‘ex eo enim dorso flumina in utrumque mare decurrunt, alia in septentrionem, alia in meridiem.’