be of purely native Celtic origin. And if this be so, is it not
unpatriotic in the highest degree for the heads of our principal
Mackenzie families to persist in supplying Burke, Foster, and other
authors of Peerages, Baronet ages, and County Families, with the
details of an alien Irish origin like the impossible Fitzgerald myth
upon which they have, in entire error, been feeding their vanity
since its invention by the first Earl of Cromartie little more
than two hundred years ago. For be it remembered that all these
Norman and Florentine pedigrees and descents are supplied to
the compilers of such genealogical works as those by members of
the respective families themselves, and that the editors are not
personally responsible for nor do they in any way guarantee their
accuracy. It is really difficult to understand the feeling that
has so long prompted most of our leading Highlanders to show such
an unnatural and unpatriotic preference for alien progenitors -
claiming the Norman enemies and conquerers of their country, or
mythical Irish adventurers, as ancestors to be proud of. Writing of
the clans who claim this alien origin the late Dr W. F. Skene,
Historiographer Royal for Scotland, says -

"As the identity of the false aspect which the true tradition,
assumes in all these cases implies that the case was the same
all, we may assume that wherever these two circumstances are to be
found combined, of a clan claiming a foreign origin and asserting
a marriage with the heiress of a Highland family whose estates
they possessed and whose followers they led, they must invariably
have been the oldest cadet of that family, who, by usurpation or
otherwise, had become de facto chief of the clan, and who covered
their defect by right of blood by denying their descent from the
clan, and asserting that the founder had married the heiress of