being "the fortress of the hill," and was its other
Cymric appellation Agnedh, connected with its ever having been given as
a marriage-portion (Agwedh)? Or did its old name of Maiden Castle, or
Castrum Puellarum, not rather originate in its olden use as a female
prison, or as a school, or a nunnery?

And is it true, as asserted by Conchubhranus, that the Irish lady Saint,
Darerca or Monnine, founded, late in the fifth century, seven churches
(or nunneries?) in Scotland, on the hills of Dun Edin, Dumbarton,
Stirling, Dunpelder, and Dundevenal, at Lanfortin near Dundee, and at
Chilnacase in Galloway?

When, and by whom, were the Round Towers of Abernethy, Brechin, and
Eglishay built? Were there not in Scotland or its islands other such
"_turres rotundae mira arte constructae_," to borrow the phrase of
Hector Boece regarding the Brechin tower?

If St. Patrick was, as some of his earliest biographers aver, a
Strathclyde Briton, born about A.D. 387 at Nempthur (Nemphlar, on the
Clyde?) and his father Calphurnius was, as St. Patrick himself states in
his Confession, a deacon, and his grandfather Potitus a priest, then he
belonged to a family two generations of which were already
office-bearers in Scotland in the Christian Church;--but were there
many, or any such families in Scotland before St. Ninian built his stone
church at Whithern about A.D. 397, or St. Palladius, the missionary of
Pope Celestine, died about A.D. 431, in the Mearns? And was it a mere
rhetorical flourish, or was there some foundation for the strong and
distinct averment of the Latin father Tertullian, that, when he wrote,
about the time of the invasion of Scotland by Severus (_circa_ A.D.
210), there were places in Britain beyond the limits of the Roman sway
already subject to Christ?

When Dion Cassius describes this invasion of Scotland by Severus, and
the Roman Emperor's loss of 50,000 men in the campaign, does he not
indulge in "travellers' tales," when he further avers that our
Caledonian ancestors were such votaries of hydropathy that they could
stand in their marshes immersed up to the neck in water for live-long
days, and had a kind of prepared homoeopathic food, the eating of a
piece of which, the size of a bean, entirely prevented all hunger and
thirst?

Caesar tells us that dying the skin blue with woad was a practice common
among our British ancestors some 1900 years ago;--are Claudian and
Herodian equally correct in describing the very