a roll of those Punic Annals which Festus Avienus tells us that he
himself consulted when (probably in the fourth century) he wrote those
lines in his "_Ora Maritima_" in which he gives a description of Great
Britain and Ireland.

The antiquaries of Scotland would heartily rejoice over the discovery of
lost documents far less ancient than these. Perhaps I could name two or
three of our colleagues who would perfectly revel over the recovery, for
instance, of one or two leaves of those old Pictish annals (_veteres
Pictorum libri_) that still existed in the twelfth century, and in
which, among other matters, was a brief account (once copied by the
Pictish clerk Thana, the son of Dudabrach, for King Ferath, at Meigle)
of the solemn ceremony which took place when King Hungus endowed the
church of St. Andrews, in presence of twelve members of the Pictish
regal race, with a grant of many miles of broad acres, and solemnly
placed with his royal hands on the altar of the church a piece of fresh
turf in symbolisation of his royal land-gift. We all deplore that we
possess no longer what the Abbot Ailred of Rievaulx, and the monk
Joceline of Furness possessed, namely, biographies, apparently written
in the old language of our country, of two of our earliest Scottish
saints--St. Ninian of Whithorn, and St. Kentigern of Glasgow; and we
grieve that we have lost even that Life of St. Serf, which, along with a
goodly list of service and other books (chained to the stalls and
desks), was placed, before the time of the Reformation, in the choir of
the Cathedral of Glasgow, as we know from the catalogue which has been
preserved of its library.

But let us not at the same time forget that Scottish archaeological
documents, as ancient as any of these, have been latterly rediscovered,
and rediscovered occasionally in the most accidental way; and let us
not, therefore, despair of further, and perhaps even of greater success
in the same line. Certainly the greatest of recent events in Scottish
Archaeology was the casual finding, within the last two or three years,
in one of the public libraries at Cambridge, of a manuscript of the
Gospels, which had formerly belonged to the Abbey of Deer, in
Aberdeenshire. The margin and blank vellum of this ancient volume
contain, in the Celtic language, some grants and entries reaching much
beyond the age of any of our other Scottish charters and chronicles. The
oldest example of written Scottish Gaelic th