The Ethnology of Scotland

Abstract

IT is as a fighting man that the Scot makes his first appearance in written history; Tacitus depicts him as ruddy in colour, big in body, strong in limb, and Germanic in origin. In 1866, when Huxley described the human remains discovered by Mr. Samuel Laing in a long-cist cemetery at Keiss, Caithness, which the discoverer regarded as of early Neolithic date, but which are now rightly assigned to a much later period—an early phase of the Iron age-he had clearly reached a conclusion very similar to that of Tacitus:—