cart had ever forced their way along its sides, we had to hire a boat for the transport of at least cart and baggage; and when the boatmen were getting ready for the voyage, which was, with the characteristic dilatoriness of the district, a work of hours, we baited at the clachan of _Kinlochewe_--a humble Highland inn, like that in which we had passed the night. The name--that of an old farm which stretches out along the _head_ or upper end of Loch Maree--has a remarkable etymology: it means simply the head of _Loch Ewe_--the salt-water loch into which the waters of Loch Maree empty themselves by a river little more than a mile in length, and whose present _head_ is some sixteen or twenty miles distant from the farm which bears its name. Ere that last elevation of the land, however, to which our country owes the level marginal strip that stretches between the present coast-line and the ancient one, the sea must have found its way to the old farm. Loch Maree (Mary's Loch), a name evidently of mediæval origin, would then have existed as a prolongation of the marine Loch Ewe, and _Kinlochewe_ would have actually been what the compound words signify--the head of Loch Ewe. There seems to be reason for holding that, ere the latest elevation of the land took place in our island, it had received its first human inhabitants--rude savages, who employed tools and weapons of stone, and fashioned canoes out of single logs of wood. Are we to accept etymologies such as the instanced one--and there are several such in the Highlands--as good, in evidence that these aboriginal savages were of the Celtic race, and that Gaelic was spoken in Scotland at a time when its strips of grassy links, and the sites of many of its seaport towns, such as Leith, Greenock, Musselburgh, and Cromarty, existed as oozy sea-beaches, covered twice every day by the waters of the ocean?