the primitive
Scot and Pict, the primitive Briton, the primitive Irish, but with a
larger admixture of the later Norwegian, Dane, Saxon, and Angle. How
this amalgamation came about we may learn from the geography of
Scotland.

The Highlands of Scotland begin at the Grampian Hills and the Lowlands
extend south from this line to the British border, and include the
cities of Glasgow and Edinburgh. The Scotch-Irish came from that
southwestern part of the Lowlands which bulges out toward Ireland north
of the Solway Firth. Over these Lowland counties, bounded by water and
hills on three sides, successive waves of conquest and migration
followed. First the primitive Caledonian or Pict was driven to the
Highlands, which to this day is the Celtic portion of Scotland. The
Briton from the south, pressed on by Roman and then by Teuton, occupied
the country. Then Irish tribes crossed over and gained a permanent hold.
Then the Norwegian sailors came around from the north, and to this day
there are pure Scandinavian types on the adjacent islands. Then the
Saxons and Angles, driven by the Danes and Normans, gained a foothold
from the east, and lastly the Danes themselves added their contingent.
Here in this Lowland pocket of territory, no larger than a good-sized
American county, was compounded for five hundred years this remarkable
amalgam of races.

A thousand years later, after they had become a united people and had
shown their metal in the trying times of the Reformation, they furnished
the emigrants who displaced the Irish in the north of Ireland. James I,
whom Scotland gave to England, determined to transform Catholic Ireland
into Protestant England, and thereupon confiscated the lands of the
native chiefs in Ulster and bestowed them upon Scottish and English
lords on condition that they settle the territory with tenants from
Scotland and England. This was the "great settlement" of 1610, and from
that time to the present Ulster has been the Protestant stronghold of
Ireland. In 1901 the population of Ulster was 44 per cent Catholic, 23
per cent Episcopalian, and 27 per cent Presbyterian, an ecclesiastical
division corresponding almost exactly to the racial division of Irish,
English, and Scotch. During the whole of the seventeenth century--the
first century of this occupation--the Catholics and Episcopalians were
in a much smaller proportion than these figures show for the present
time, and the relative increase in Irish and Ep