Before leaving these sculptured stones, it may be as well to point out one of those anomalies which meet us so frequently in these enquiries, and show how little ordinary probabilities suffice to guide to the true conclusion. Among the sculptured stones of Scotland, one of the oldest is probably the Newton stone. It has at least an Oghan inscription on its edge; and most antiquaries will admit that Oghan engravings on stone were discontinued when alphabetic writing was introduced and generally understood. It also has an alphabetic inscription on its face, but the letters are not Roman. They may be bad Greek, but certainly they appear to be pre-Roman, and therefore probably the earliest Scotch inscription known. There is another stone at Kirkliston, near Edinburgh, which has a Latin inscription on it. It is a "cat" or battle-stone, and records the name of Vetta, the son of Victis, in good Latin. Whether this Vetta is, or is not, the grandfather of Hengist and Horsa, as Sir James Simpson contended,[315] is of no great consequence to our present argument. It is of about their age, and therefore as old as any of the other stones in Scotland; and there is also a third at Yarrow,[316] with a later inscription, which seems about the same age as the Lothian example. Now the curious part of this matter is, that having begun with alphabetic writing, they entirely discontinued it, and during the six or seven centuries through which these sculptured stones certainly extend, it is the rarest possible thing to find one with an alphabetic inscription; and why this should be so is by no means clear. Take, for instance, the Aberlemmo stone just quoted. The people who erected it were Christians,--witness the cross: the ornaments on it are almost identical with those found in Irish MSS. of the seventh and eighth centuries.[317] It is thus evident that the persons who drew these ornaments could write, and being able to write and carve with such exquisite precision, it seems strange they never thought of even putting the name of the persons who erected the stone or some word expressive of its purpose. The Irish probably would have done so; and the Scandinavians would have covered them with Runes, as they did those they erected in the Isle of Man, though probably at a somewhat later date. In the instance of the two crosses illustrated in the woodcuts, Nos. 97 and 98, the first bears an inscription to the effect that "Sandulf the Swarthy erected this cross to his wife, Arnbjörg." From their names, both evidently of Scandinavian origin. The inscription on the side of the second runs thus: "Mal Lumkun erected this cross to his foster-father Malmor, or Mal Muru."[318] Both names of undoubted Gaelic derivation, thus showing that at that age at least any ethnographic theory that would give these stones exclusively to either race can hardly be maintained. The two races seem then to have followed the fashion of the day as they did in ruder times. Except