Mr. Kirk’s first chapter, “Of the Subterranean Inhabitants,” naturally suggests the recent speculations of Mr. MacRitchie. The gist of Mr. MacRitchie’s _Testimony of Tradition_ is that there once was a race of earth-dwellers in this island; that their artificial caves still exist; that this people survive in popular memory as “the legendary Feens,” and as the Pechts of popular tales, in which they are regarded as dwarfs. “The Pechs were unco wee bodies, but terrible strang.” Here, then, it might be thought that we have the origin of Fairy beliefs. There really was, on this showing, a dwarf race, who actually did live in the “fairy-hills,” or howes, now commonly looked on as sepulchral monuments. There is much in Mr. MacRitchie’s theory which does not commend itself to me. The modern legends of Pechts as builders of Glasgow Cathedral, for example, do not appear to prove such a late survival of a race known as Picts, but are on a level with the old Greek belief that the Cyclopes built Mycenæ (_Testimony of Tradition_, p. 72). Granting, for the sake of discussion, that there were still Picts or Pechs in Galloway when Glasgow Cathedral was built (in the twelfth century), these wild Galloway men, scourges of the English Border, were the very last people to be employed as masons. The truth is that the recent Scotch have entirely forgotten the ages of mediæval art. Accustomed to the ill-built barns of a robbed and stinted Kirk, they looked on the Cathedral as no work of ordinary human beings. It was a creation of the Pechts, as Mycenæ and Tiryns of the mighty walls were creations of the Cyclopes. By another coincidence, the well-known story of the last Pecht, who refuses to divulge the secret of the heather ale, is told in the Volsunga Saga, and in the _Nibelungenlied_, of the Last Niflung. Again, the breaking of a bar of iron, which he takes for a human arm, by the last Pecht is a tale current of the Drakos in modern Greece (see Chambers’s _Popular Traditions of Scotland_ for the last Pecht). I cannot believe that the historical Picts were a set of half-naked, dwarfish savages, hairy men living underground. These are the topics of Sir Arthur Wardour and Monkbarns. Mr. W. F. Skene may be said to have put the historic Picts in their proper place as the ancestors of the Highlanders. The Pecht of legend answers to the Drakos and the Cyclopes: the beliefs about his habits may have been suggested by the tumuli, still more by the _brochs_: it seems less probable that they represent an historical memory. As to the Irish “Feens,” the topic can only be discussed by Celtic scholars. But it does not follow, because the leader of the Feens seemed a dwarf among giants, that therefore his people were a dwarfish race.[2] The story proves no more than Gulliver’s Travels.