“Compared to a book of poetry, it thus appears that each tune is like a song, and _hirrin_ is like a word in a line which keeps its place and its time in the tune. That much we learned from our interpreter. He had learned by rote certain articulate syllables combined as words which for him meant passages in a particular pipe tune. For the ignorant residue of mankind they meant nothing.” There Mr. Campbell had to stop, for further light on the subject he could not obtain. “The pipers’ language,” he says, “is not founded upon a systematic combination of vowels and consonants to make words, like C E D, D E C, D E D. It is not a set of names for notes, like Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Si, Do. Each tune has a different set of words made of different syllables. Only nine notes can be sounded on the instrument, and more than sixty syllables occur in a book of twenty tunes.” Mr. Campbell must have been unaware of the assertion of some enthusiasts that 3,000,000 combinations can be practised on the pipes, or he would not have written that last sentence. Proceeding, he says, “it seems that something natural to human songsters has been spelt with the Roman alphabet, so that words of one, two, three, four, six, and eight syllables, do in fact suggest accent rhythm and tune, high and low notes and whole tunes, which can be learned by rote, written and read, as if the tunes were songs in an unknown tongue. This is in fact a language and its music.” Persevering in his researches Mr. Campbell got Ross, the Argyll piper, his brother, and a skilled pianist to help him. He opened the Gesto book at the tune called “The End of the Little Bridge;” Ross read the tune and sounded the signs on a chanter, while his brother chanted at intervals sounds which both brothers had learned from oral chanting and could play on a pipe. The musician with his eyes on the book played his notes with his left hand on the piano, as he heard them from the pipers, and wrote them with his right on music paper, according to his own system. By this means one combination of sounds was translated from the pipers’ written language into another system of musical notation, and the result was music, showing that the hereditary pipers, whatever is the secret of their system, had a system. Were there only as many different syllables as there are possible notes on the chanter, the matter would have been easily understood. As it is, the Gesto book is the only book of its kind in existence. In all countries of the world, the natives chant tunes to certain strings of syllables, and to this day we have the “Fal de ral” choruses to a certain class of songs. In the Highlands alone these apparently nonsensical sentences stood for actual living music, were written as such, and, in the Gesto book, printed. But the system which in a continuance of the congenial atmosphere of clanship and hereditary pipers and schools of piping, and ignorance of