But setting aside these Latin books in which the Gaelic jottings are purely incidental and secondary, we need to come down as far as the eleventh century to reach the existing sources of the earliest written compositions in the native tongue. It is in such MSS. as the Leabhar Na h’Uidhre, the Book of Hymns, and the other great MiddleAge gleanings of after days that we find the Patrician and Columban literature as well as the ancient sagas. Till within very recent times the Celt had no idea that he was heir to such a vast literary inheritance as really exists. As in the olden times men sometimes buried their wealth to save it from the hands of ruthless foes, and, dying themselves or falling in the fray, lived not to indicate to others the site of their hid treasures, so it has happened in the case of Gaelic literature. Much of it perished at the hands of the enemy and the avenger. What was saved from the wreck of the more stormy and turbulent periods of our history owes its existence to-day very largely to concealment and neglect. And as the plough or the spade occasionally turns up an old stone cist, or a casket of ancient coins, or a canoe of primitive man, so the casual researches of antiquarians and scholars have brought to light a hidden mass of ancient writings which appear to have been scattered broadcast over Europe and the British Isles. These Gaelic relics are now jealously preserved in various countries, and within the last century have been made the subject of the most interested scrutiny by leading Continental and British philologists, with the result that they have thrown a welcome light on some of the darker problems of history, philology, and ethnology. For example, as late as the first quarter of last century few people had any idea that the Celtic populations were allied with the southern nations of Europe, or that their language had any connection whatever with the Romance and Teutonic tongues. One solitary scholar,[9] indeed, threw out the hint as early as 1786, but offered no proof; and it remained a visionary hypothesis until the long list of documents reappearing one by one enabled scholars to establish the point beyond question, that linguistically the Celtic people are a branch of the great Aryan family, and thus closely allied with the Teutonic, and still more nearly with the Greek and the Latin peoples. Roughly, this relationship may be represented as under. The table is not meant to indicate race affinities, which it is very far indeed from doing, but simply to exhibit the affinities of language which modern philological studies have traced:—