When people of a different race and language settle in a country, or when the language changes, as happened in Orkney after its annexation to Scotland, the old names may still be used, although when their meaning is unknown or has been forgotten they are apt to be changed in various ways. People rarely take the trouble of inventing a new name for a place if they can find out the name already given to it. Thus if there had been any Celtic or Pictish inhabitants left in Orkney when the Norsemen settled there, the Celtic names of the islands and hills and bays would have been handed down from them to us. But all the old place-names in Orkney are Norse, and the only Celtic elements found in them refer to the settlements and churches of the Culdees, as we have already mentioned. The Norse place-names are usually descriptive, based either on the appearance or the situation of the place, or on the name of its occupier. Such names have an interest which is entirely wanting in the modern names given to farms or houses, names which are often selected for absurd or trivial reasons. There is little need for inventing any new names in a land which has been so fully supplied with them already. For it is not only the various islands and their most prominent physical features that bear descriptive Norse names; hillock and meadow, field and spring, rock, geo, and skerry—all have been named by our forefathers with names of which the form as well as the meaning is now in many cases forgotten. Those names should be regarded as relics entrusted to our care, and we ought to learn them from the old people by whom they are still remembered, and preserve them from alteration or oblivion, as the material relics of our romantic history are now being preserved from destruction and decay. _Orkney_, the general name of the island group, is partly Celtic and partly Norse. Pliny, the Roman geographer, mentions _Cape Orcas_, probably Duncansby Head in Caithness, and calls the islands _Orcades_. The Celtic Scots called them the _Orc Islands_, and southern writers use the form _Orcanig_. The root of the name is supposed to be _orc_, which meant the bottlenose whale. The Norse visitors added the termination _-ey_, meaning “island.”