The Rev. Dr. John Stuart of Luss was responsible for the rendering from Hebrew into Gaelic of the first three parts, and the Rev. Dr. John Smith of Campbeltown for the fourth, which appeared second in point of publication. Their MS. translations were, before being sent to press, submitted for revision to a Committee of Highland clergymen specially selected; and by order of the General Assembly of 1782 a collection was made in all the parishes to defray the expense. This appointment was renewed in 1783 and 1784, as the funds of the S.P.C.K. were reduced, and the outlay on publication amounted to £2300 for some 5000 copies, with an additional number of Part I. containing the Pentateuch. The whole work was printed on fine and common paper; and until the early decades of last century was looked upon as the standard of Gaelic orthography. Considering that the Bible has since come to be regarded as a kind of fetich in the Highlands, it is somewhat surprising to learn that there was no complete rendering of it in the language earlier than 1801, just a century ago. And apparently not till 1807 were the Gaelic Old and New Testaments finally printed together in one volume. In that year they were thus issued in England for the first time on behalf of the British and Foreign Bible Society, who chose two different colours of paper for the purpose—the one blue for the Old Testament, and the other yellow for the New, which gave the book rather a polychrome appearance. The impression amounted to 20,000 copies, each of which cost the Society 6s. 6d., though they issued them to subscribers at half that price. Of the Gaelic Scriptures there have been fourteen different recensions. From the time of the publication of Dugald Buchanan’s and Duncan Ban Macintyre’s compositions in 1767–68, may be reckoned the real beginning of the new era of printing, so far as the production of original Gaelic literature was concerned, and that mainly poetry, for of prose the land was singularly barren, except in translations. And it will hardly be credited that from the introduction of printing down to the end of the eighteenth century, just about a hundred years ago, if we exclude the translations from other languages, and extra editions of books already published, there were not in all three dozen printed original Scottish-Gaelic works to be found. The day of copious issue had not yet arrived for the sweet and tuneful Gaelic. Even the collected MSS. of Macpherson did not appear in type till 1807, almost half a century after his so-called translations electrified the literary world.