he is a Celt, and not a Saxon.
Of course one knows how it will all end. Ere long the unadulterated
Celt will be driven or improved out of these islands, and will retire
to other lands, where, mingling and intermarrying with Teutons, he
will eventually disappear, but not without leavening the races amongst
which he is destined to vanish. And who will take his place in the
Long Island? Probably a few farmers, a few shepherds, and a sprinkling
of gamekeepers; and it is just possible that a few fishermen also may
be allowed to settle down here and there upon the coast. One may see
the process going on at present. Large tracts that once supported many
villages are now quite depopulated. The time will come when somebody in
Parliament will move for the reduction of the Civil Service estimates
by the amount of the sheriff-substitute's salary, and when the jail at
Lochmaddy will have nothing higher in the scale of being to imprison
than some refractory ram. One may be pardoned for wishing that he could
foretell for the islands another fate than this. It is sad to think
that a fine race of people is thus surely passing away from amongst
us, for, despite all that can be urged against them, they are what I
say. The fishermen of Lewis and Barra are bold, stalwart fellows, whom
it would be difficult to peer amongst any similar class of men on the
mainland. And all through the island one meets with equally excellent
specimens of our kind. Many a brave soldier who fought our battles in
the great French wars hailed from these outer islands. Pity it is that
no feasible plan to prevent the threatened scattering of the race has
yet been brought forward. Some day we may regret this, and come to
think that though mutton and wool in the Long Island are desirable, yet
islanders would have been better.
[Postscript.--On pages 153.4 I have described the second general
ice-sheet that overflowed the Outer Hebrides as having eventually
become resolved into a series of local ice-sheets and glaciers.
Subsequent research, however, has since led me to believe that the
district ice-sheets and local glaciers referred to were not the
direct descendants of the last great ice-sheet. They appear to
have come into existence long after that ice-sheet had entirely
disappeared. _See_ Article X.]
VI.
The Ice Age in Europe and North America.[K]
[K] Address to the Geological Society of Edinburgh, 1884.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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