[Sidenote: Artificial character of these pedigrees.] It is thus obvious how artificial the earlier links of these genealogies are, and that none of them can in fact be pushed further back than the reign of Kenneth MacAlpin, the oldest link in many of them being contemporary with him, while others fall short of that period. Between the oldest link of those which reach that date and the Dalriadic king of the race of Lorn with which they are connected there is a complete blank, and it is thus plain that the same process of manipulation and artificial construction had taken place with these pedigrees, which had perverted the genealogy of the kings of the line of Kenneth MacAlpin. In the latter case an entire century, with all its events, from 740 to 840, had been suppressed, and Kenneth, the founder of the new dynasty in the ninth century, directly connected with the last of the old kings of Dalriada, of the race of Gabhran, who lived a century earlier. In like manner the genealogies of the clans which reach only to the ninth century, were directly connected with the last of the Dalriadic kings of the line of Lorn, who died in 697. It is not without some significance too that we find such Pictish forms as _Neachtain_, _Fingaine_, _Morgainn_, etc., occurring in the early part of these pedigrees. They may then be regarded as trustworthy only in so far as they show the links of the descent of each clan from its _eponymus_ as believed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the grouping of certain clans together where a common ancestor within the historic period is assigned to them. [Sidenote: Third change. Influence of Act of 1597.]