Neither has the Saxon Chronicle. We infer this from the extent to which it follows Beda. We infer it, too, still more certainly from the following passage--a passage which, if made in the year under which it is found, would be no record but a prophecy. A.D. 595.--"This year Æthelbriht succeeded to the kingdom of the Kentish men, and held it fifty-three years. In his days the Holy Pope Gregory sent us baptism. That was in the two-and-thirtieth year of his reign; and Columba, a mass-priest, came to the Picts and converted them to the faith of Christ. They are dwellers by the northern mountains. And their king gave him the island which is called Hi. Therein are fine hides of land, as men say. There Columba built a monastery, and he was abbot there thirty-two years, and there he died when he was seventy-seven years old. His successors still have the place. The Southern Picts had been baptized long before; Bishop Ninias, who had been instructed at Rome, had preached baptism to them, whose church and monastery is at Hwithern, hallowed in the name of St. Martin; there he resteth with many holy men. Now, in Hi there must ever be an abbot and not a bishop; and all the Scottish bishops ought to be subject to him, because Columba was an abbot, not a bishop." Similar notices, impossible, without a vast amount of gratuitous assumption, to be considered cotemporaneous, are of frequent occurrence until long after the consolidation of the Anglo-Saxon power in England; but as the events of the fifth and sixth centuries are the only events of ethnological importance, the notice of them is limited. The Welsh poems attributed to the bards of the sixth and seventh centuries, contain no facts that will make part of any of our reasonings in the sequel. Their existence is, of course, a measure of the intellectual calibre of the time (whatever that may be) to which they refer. But this is not before us now. In respect to the value of the Irish annals, the civil historian has a far longer list of problems than the ethnologist; since the latter wants their testimony upon a few points only, _e.g._, 1. The origin of the proper Irish themselves; 2. the affinities of the Picts; 3. the migration (real or supposed) of the Scots. These, at least, are the chief points. Others, of course, such as the details concerning the Danes, can be found; but the ones in question are the chief.