The one absolutely certain conclusion to which the student of ethnology can come is that the name of the Picts has not been proved to be of pre-Aryan origin.
3. Still, Professors Rhys and Zimmer will have it that the Picts must have been a non-Aryan people. Caesar,[1818] in a well-known passage, states that among the Britons groups of ten or twelve men had wives in common; in other words, that one of the British customs was polyandry. It has generally been assumed that he meant to say that the custom was prevalent among the Britons generally; but Zimmer, after reviewing the whole chapter in which the passage occurs, concludes that it refers only to _interiores_--the Britons of the interior[1819]--whom Caesar contrasts with _maritimi_,--the descendants of the Belgic invaders. The latter, he argues, according to Caesar’s express statement, differed but slightly in their customs from the Gauls:[1820] therefore the words in which Caesar describes the British custom of polyandry cannot refer to them, but must refer to _interiores_.[1821] The two professors agree in thinking that Caesar, owing to his ‘inability to realize a state of society exclusively based on birth’,[1822] misunderstood the institution which he tried to describe; in other words, that that institution was not polyandry but matriarchy,--the rule of succession by which rank and property are transmitted in the female line; a king, for example, being succeeded not by his own son but by the son of one of his sisters.[1823] Zimmer, referring to Schrader’s _Prehistoric Antiquities of the Aryan Peoples_,[1824] remarks that among all Aryan-speaking peoples and among the primitive Aryans the custom by which a father is succeeded by his own son (_das Vaterrecht_) was the foundation of social ordinance.[1825] Professor Rhys,[1826] indeed, thinks that this generalization cannot be proved, and refers to a well-known passage in the 20th chapter of the _Germania_ of Tacitus,--‘Sisters’ sons are held in as much esteem by their uncles as by their fathers: indeed, some regard the relation as even more sacred and binding’,[1827] &c. (_Sororum filiis idem apud avunculum qui apud patrem honor: quidam sanctiorem artioremque hunc nexum sanguinis arbitrantur_); but he suggests that the tribe of which Tacitus speaks may have been mixed with some ‘aboriginal race practising the same institution as the aborigines of the British Isles’. And I suggest that the Picts were Celts mixed with aborigines who practised this same institution, and consequently that if it prevailed among the Picts, its prevalence does not prove that they were in any special sense representatives of the aborigines, or that they spoke a non-Aryan language.[1828]