By the well-known gleaners above mentioned, the heroic ballads, the lyric poems, and the songs have been securely garnered. But there still remained one large section of the field from which hitherto there had been no great ingathering, necessary to complete the harvest up to our time. And happily, ere the century closed, the crowning work appeared. It is a remarkable book and sumptuous, published in two volumes, in 1900, by Alexander Carmichael, who was for many years a member of Her Majesty’s Inland Revenue staff, and an enthusiastic admirer of Gaelic lore. The work is styled “_Carmina Gadelica_,—hymns and incantations, with illustrative notes on words, rites, and customs, dying and obsolete; orally collected in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, and translated into English,” by the author. Undoubtedly it places the compiler in the very front rank of Celtic gleaners, and will carry its testimony forward to posterity, as a monument of a phase of thought and life now passing away. Even already its weird and old-world “ortha, urnan agus ubagan,” sound like the echoes of a far-off time, from which the race has long since emerged. Yet its cultured author tells us that this work consists of old lore collected during the last forty-four years, forming but a small part of a large mass of oral literature written down from the recital of men and women throughout the land of the Gael, from Arran to Caithness, and from Perth to St. Kilda. The greater portion, however, was made in the Western Isles, the last refuge of the distinctive Celtic life “expiring on the horizon before the growing tumult of uniform civilisation.” For three centuries Gaelic oral literature has been disappearing, and, as our author tells us, it is now becoming meagre in quantity, inferior in quality, and greatly isolated. “Several causes have contributed towards this decadence,” he says, “principally the Reformation, the rebellions, the evictions, the Disruption, the schools, and the spirit of the age. Converts in religion, in politics, or in aught else are apt to be intemperate in speech and rash in action. The Reformation movement condemned the beliefs and cults tolerated and assimilated by the Celtic Church and the Latin Church. Nor did sculpture and architecture escape their intemperate zeal. The rebellions harried and harassed the people, while the evictions impoverished, dispirited, and scattered them over the world. Ignorant school teaching and clerical narrowness have been painfully detrimental to the expressive language, wholesome literature, manly sports, and interesting amusements of the Highland people.” Mr. Carmichael has classified the contents of his extensive gleaning under the following five sub-titles: Invocations, Seasons, Labour, Incantations, Miscellaneous, and in the general introduction explains his mode of gathering the materials.