Reasons for considering the Scotch and English as _dialects_ of one and the same language lie in the fact of their being (except in the case of the more extreme forms of each) mutually intelligible. Reasons for calling one a dialect of the other depend upon causes other than philological, _e.g._, political preponderance, literary development, and the like. Reasons for treating the Scotch as a separate substantive language lie in the extent to which it has the qualities of a regular cultivated tongue, and a separate substantive literature--partially separate and substantive at the present time, wholly separate and substantive in the times anterior to the union of the crowns, and in the hands of Wyntoun, Blind Harry, Dunbar, and Lindsay. s. 184. Reasons for making the _philological_ distinction between the English and Scotch dialects exactly coincide with the geographical and political boundaries between the two kingdoms are not so easily given. It is not likely that the Tweed and Solway should divide modes of speech so accurately as they divide laws and customs; that broad and trenchant lines of demarcation should separate the Scotch {125} from the English exactly along the line of the Border; and that there should be no Scotch elements in Northumberland, and no Northumbrian ones in Scotland. Neither is such the case. Hence, in speaking of the Lowland Scotch, it means the language in its typical rather than in its transitional forms; indeed, it means the _literary_ Lowland Scotch which, under the first five Stuarts, was as truly an independent language as compared with the English, as Swedish is to Danish, Portuguese to Spanish, or _vice vers[^a]_. s. 185. This limitation leaves us fully sufficient room for the notice of the question as to its _origin_; a notice all the more necessary from the fact of its having created controversy. What is the _prim[^a] facie_ view of the relations between the English of England, and the mutually intelligible language (Scotch or English, as we choose to call it) of Scotland? One of three:-- 1. That it originated in England, and spread in the way of extension and diffusion northwards, and so reached Scotland. 2. That it originated in Scotland, and spread in the way of extension and diffusion southwards, and so reached England. 3. That it was introduced in each country from a common source. In any of these cases it is Angle, or Saxon, or Anglo-Saxon, even as English is Angle, or Saxon, or Anglo-Saxon.