most useful work, and also with Mr. Whyte brought out some Gaelic school books. But, though his brain was active and his interest unabated, he no longer possessed the physical elasticity necessary to continue the strain to which he had subjected himself. He had overtaxed even his iron constitution, and now, when his school-day’s work was over, he contented himself with lighter things. Two or three subjects in particular occupied him specially for the last half-dozen years or more—the study of Personal Names, the Place-Names of Inverness-shire, and the annotation of his Dictionary. A specimen of his finest and most mature work in Place-Names appears in the current volume of the Gaelic Society’s Transaction. The same applies to his paper on Personal Names, which appeared in the fifth number of the Celtic Review. His other principal contribution to its pages was a review of my own Place-Names of Ross and Cromarty.
The pages occupied by the present notice had been reserved for a review—such as he alone could write—of Dr. E. Windisch’s great Táin Bó Cualnge.
As a supplement to the Dictionary, Dr. Macbain printed separately in vol. xxi. of the Inverness Gaelic Society’s Transactions a list extending to 20 pp. of ‘Further Gaelic Words and Etymologies.’ In a prefatory note, after referring to the very flattering reception which the Dictionary had met, he goes on to make some interesting and characteristic remarks on the criticisms it had evoked. ‘Nor did the work fail to meet with critics who acted on Goldsmith’s golden rule in the Citizen of the World—to ask of any comedy why it was not a tragedy, and of any tragedy why it was not a comedy. I was asked how I had not given derivative words—though for that matter most of the seven thousand words in the Dictionary are derivatives; such a question overlooked the character of the work. Manifest derivatives belong to ordinary dictionaries, not to an etymological one. This was clearly indicated in the preface. . . . Another criticism was unscientific in the extreme; I was found fault with for excluding Irish words! Why, it was the best service I could render to Celtic philology, to present a pure vocabulary of the Scottish dialect of Gaelic.’
Such is a brief and incomplete account of Macbain’s written work. But that is not all. No man could be more generous in helping others. Either by letter or by conversation, the stores of his knowledge and the wisdom of his counsel were open to all fellow-students. Of jealousy he was wholly free: his one aim was to add to the sum total of scientific knowledge, to enlarge the kingdom of facts. Sometimes his generosity was poorly rewarded; this, knowing human nature, he took philosophically.
Much might be said, something must be said, about the man himself. The following extract from a diary now before me speaks for itself. On New Year’s Day 1875, being then a student at the Grammar School of Old Aberdeen, he writes:—‘I think that I have now a good chance of yet appearing as an M.A. on equal terms in education with the other literary men of our day, a goal which has always been my ambition to
