For my part I accept the professor’s emendation unreservedly. Picts the Caledonians certainly were; for does not the author of the panegyric addressed to Constantine speak of ‘the Caledonians and other Picts’?[1842] But for me the Picts were a mixed people, comprising descendants of the neolithic aborigines, of the Round Barrow race, and of the Celtic invaders,--a mixed people who spoke a Celtic dialect. And what puzzles me is that the professor should not have been struck by the anthropological facts that are fatal to the theory that the Caledonians were Picts in the sense which he attaches to the word,--that is, pure survivors of the neolithic aborigines, who spoke a non-Aryan language. For the neolithic aborigines, as we have seen, were, speaking generally, small dark men of the ‘Iberian’ type: the Caledonians were big fair or red-haired men. Doubtless there were, as I have said, ‘Iberian’ survivors among them; but who will deny that the powerful race whom Tacitus describes were predominant, or that their Aryan tongue had prevailed?[1843]
4. It is usually inferred from statements in Claudian[1844] and Herodian[1845] that the Picts tattooed themselves; and their testimony is supposed to be strengthened by the etymology of the names by which the Picts were known to the Irish and Welsh respectively,--_Cruthni_ and _Prydain_. The former is said to be derived from _cruth_,[1846] the Gaelic word for ‘form’ or ‘shape’; and the latter from its Welsh equivalent, _pryd_.[1847] Thus _Cruthni_ and _Prydain_ would mean ‘the people whose bodies were decorated with figures’; and, as we have seen, Zimmer has no doubt that the Roman name for the Picts--_Picti_, or ‘painted men’--was simply a translation of _Prydain_ or its older equivalent. Professor Rhys, who, in one of his many and diverse utterances on the subject, affirmed that _pictos_ was a Celtican word,[1848] drew this conclusion from the fact, pointed out by Mr. Nicholson,[1849] that a coin of the Gallic tribe of the Pictones[1850] bears on the obverse a tattooed face; and he supposes that the reason why the Celticans applied this word to the Picts was that the latter tattooed themselves. ‘The Picts of Britain and Ireland,’ he remarks, ‘are found also called _Pictones_’; and ‘ancient Egyptian monuments represent the Libyans of North Africa with their bodies tattooed’.[1851]