sent us baptism. That was in the two-and-thirtieth year of his reign;
and Columba, a mass-priest, came to the Picts and converted them to the
faith of Christ. They are dwellers by the northern mountains. And their
king gave him the island which is called Hi. Therein are fine hides of
land, as men say. There Columba built a monastery, and he was abbot
there thirty-two years, and there he died when he was seventy-seven
years old. His successors still have the place. The Southern Picts had
been baptized long before; Bishop Ninias, who had been instructed at
Rome, had preached baptism to them, whose church and monastery is at
Hwithern, hallowed in the name of St. Martin; there he resteth with many
holy men. Now, in Hi there must ever be an abbot and not a bishop; and
all the Scottish bishops ought to be subject to him, because Columba was
an abbot, not a bishop."

Similar notices, impossible, without a vast amount of gratuitous
assumption, to be considered cotemporaneous, are of frequent occurrence
until long after the consolidation of the Anglo-Saxon power in England;
but as the events of the fifth and sixth centuries are the only events
of ethnological importance, the notice of them is limited.

The Welsh poems attributed to the bards of the sixth and seventh
centuries, contain no facts that will make part of any of our reasonings
in the sequel. Their existence is, of course, a measure of the
intellectual calibre of the time (whatever that may be) to which they
refer. But this is not before us now.

In respect to the value of the Irish annals, the civil historian has a
far longer list of problems than the ethnologist; since the latter wants
their testimony upon a few points only, _e.g._, 1. The origin of the
proper Irish themselves; 2. the affinities of the Picts; 3. the
migration (real or supposed) of the Scots. These, at least, are the
chief points. Others, of course, such as the details concerning the
Danes, can be found; but the ones in question are the chief.

In respect to the first, whoever reads Dr. Prichard's[14] account of the
contents of the earliest chronicles, consisting, amongst other matters,
of an antediluvian Caesar; a landing of Partholanus with his wife Ealga,
on the coast of Connemara, twelve years after the Deluge, and on the
14th of May; the colony of the Neimhidh, descendants of Gog and Magog;
the Fir-Bolg from the Thrace; the Tuatha de Danann from Athens; and,
above all, the famous Milesians, a