different clans, they are entirely artificial and untrustworthy,
but that the older genealogies may be accepted as showing the descent
of the clan from its eponymus or founder, and within reasonable
limits for some generations beyond him, while the later spurious
pedigrees must be rejected altogether. It may seem surprising that
such spurious and fabulous origins should be so readily credited
by the clan families as genuine traditions, and receive such prompt
acceptance as the true fount from which they sprung; but we must
recollect that the fabulous history of Hector Boece was as rapidly
and universally adopted as the genuine annals of the national
history, and became rooted in those parts of the country to
which its fictitious events related as local traditions." ['Celtic
Scotland,' Vol. III., p. 364.]

The final decision to which Dr Skene comes in his great work is
that the clans, properly so called, were of native origin, and that
the surnames adopted by them were partly of native and partly of
foreign descent. Among these native Highland clans he unhesitatingly
classes the Mackenzies, the clan Gillie-Andres or Rosses, and the
Mathesons, all of whom belong, he says, to the tribe of Ross. In
his first work on the Highlands and Highland Clans he draws the
general deduction, based on all our existing MS. genealogies, that
the clans were divided into several great tribes, descended from
a common ancestor, but he at the same time makes a marked distinction
between the different tribes which, by indications traceable in
each, can be identified with the earldoms or maormorships into
which the North of Scotland was originally divided. By the aid
of the old genealogies he divides the clans into five different
tribes in the following order:- (1) The descendants of Conn of the
Hundred Battles; (2) of Ferchar Fata Mac Feradaig; (3) of Cormaig