ALTHOUGH Scottish Gaelic must have been spoken in America by separate families and individuals since the beginning of the eighteenth century, there is no record of its having become established as the speech of a community until nearly a hundred years later, when the first large scale emigration to Canada from the Highlands of Scotland took place. This emigration was partly voluntary, due to the pressure of overpopulation and poverty and the desire common among a peasantry who were mostly tenants at will to establish themselves on a more secure basis, but it was in large part forced by the policy of eviction adopted by many Highland proprietors with the purpose of ridding themselves of the burden of an impoverished tenantry or of establishing sheep farms, which were very profitable at the time of the Napoleonic Wars. The circumstances of these evictions, which took place between 1784 and 1851, were often extremely discreditable and their memory is still vivid among Gaels both in Canada and in Scotland.