An ancient curio—Second oldest book of Scotland—Where did it come from?—Its contents threefold—Gaelic colophon from the ninth century—The work of a native scribe of Alba—Peculiarities—The ecclesiastical art of the period—The Gaelic entries—“Legend of Deer”—Drostan’s tears—Some very quaint history—The earliest source for Scottish Gaelic—Authentic glimpses into the Celtic condition of Scotland—Origin of shires, parishes, burghs, individual freedom, and the use of the English language—Three editions of the Gaelic of the Book of Deer—Now one of the very oldest MSS. of native origin that Cambridge can boast of. In the year 1860, Mr. Henry Bradshaw, Librarian of Cambridge University, while rummaging among old books, came upon a curious production which at once usurped his attention. Here, thought he, is surely a survival from some remote time. And examining the MS., he found it to consist of eighty-six parchment leaves, six inches long, four and a half wide, and closely written on both sides. The language was Latin, written in the Irish character, “not very unlike the Bodleian Cædmon.” Each page showed marks of ruling with a sharp instrument, and the letters hung from the ruled lines instead of resting on them. The pages were surrounded by ornamented borders, most of them filled in with interlaced work in panels, and with fretwork of a peculiar kind. On a casual inspection of the subject-matter, the accomplished librarian had no difficulty in ascertaining that it consisted of the first six chapters of St Matthew’s Gospel, and part (verses 1–22) of the seventh; the first four chapters of St. Mark, and part of the fifth (to middle of verse 35); the first three chapters of St. Luke, with the first verse of the fourth; the whole of the Gospel of St. John; a fragment of an Office for the Visitation of the Sick, in a later hand; and the Apostles’ Creed. The writing of the Gospels was all in one uniform hand, the ink dark-brown with age, and the initial letters of paragraphs designed in fanciful dragonesque forms and variously coloured. At the end of the book, just after the Apostles’ Creed, the writer had added a colophon in another language, which looked like Gaelic, and on the margins and vacant spaces of the volume there was a number of entries in the same vernacular, but evidently inserted much later. What greatly enhanced the rarity and interest of this remarkable codex, in the finder’s eyes, was that it also contained a collection of coloured pictures and ornamental designs contemporary with the writing, executed in the same style, and apparently by the same hand that penned the Gospels.