Two hundred years ago there were few, if any, books bearing on the subject, and were it not for the powerful memories of the hereditary pipers of the different clans, and their devotion to their art, but little even of the music of that time could have been preserved. The hereditary pipers were walking storehouses of Highland musical knowledge. They taught their pupils by ear and off the fingers. Taking them out to the hillside, they first learned them to chant words with the tunes in a sort of “unintelligible jargon,” then to finger the chanter silently from memory, then to play the chanter, and afterwards to play the pipes themselves. This system, if such it could be called, required as its very groundwork the possession on the part of the pupil of an ear for music, a natural aptitude for pipe music, a devotion to the music peculiar to the Highlands, and an intimate knowledge of and reverence for all the circumstances which entwined themselves into the histories of the various tunes. Without these qualifications no man could be a great piper, and the hereditary pipers were very chary about beginning to train anyone who did not promise to come up to their expectations. The “unintelligible jargon” just referred to is perhaps the most curious thing in all the history of pipe music. The words are not a fair description, for it was intelligible enough to the initiated, but from the point of view of others, no other phrase is suitable. It was, in short, a system whereby known and fixed sounds in the shape of syllables represented sounds in the shape of notes of music known to the teacher, but unknown to the pupil, in such a way that when the pupil, after being taught, heard a number of the syllables repeated by word of mouth, he could at once reproduce their prototypes as a bit of pipe music. There were no signs about it whatever, no noting of the syllables—that is in the early stages of the system—and it is difficult for us who can hardly imagine music without conjuring up a book before the mind’s eye, to grasp the idea. The transmission of music by a system of language signs is peculiar to the pipes, and no full parallel to _Canntaireachd_, as it has been called, is to be found in any other country. By this “unintelligible jargon” of syllables the hereditary pipers trained their pupils, without the aid of any scales or other notations, and in this form the tunes were chanted all over the Highlands. To this day many pipers will give the syllabic wordings of tunes, and several of the more expert can play the pipes direct from such a notation. The different teachers of piping—they were always clan pipers—had different systems, but all were based on the principle of arbitrary and known sounds, representing certain notes, and a succession of these, of course, a tune. The system of the Mac Crimmons, hereditary pipers to Mac Leod of Dunvegan, and the most famous teachers and players, became most popular,