Stockings used to be made out of the web of tartan but they are now knitted. Tartan ribbons, like stockings, are attached to the garters.
In order to understand the significance of the clans it is well to remember that Scotland was divided in, two parts: the Highlands and the Lowlands. The Highlands comprised the northwest of the country, occupying little over half the area. Formerly the map of Scotland was divided into clans and countries. A clan means a family, or tribe, all loyally under the will of a chief, or chieftain. The Highlands were divided up among 31 clans. Each clan had a dress of distinctive tartan. In some cases a clan had more than one design. The Stuart and Campbell clans and some others had five. In such cases there was a special tartan reserved for the chief. The others wore the dress tartan (in which the plaid appears on a white ground), and the hunting and mourning tartans. Thus while there are but 31 clans in the Highlands there are 96 Highland tartans. Ignorance of this leads to many disputes as to the correctness of a particular tartan, it being generally thought that a clan had but one tartan.
It should be remembered that a tar tan° is the specific variety of tartan worn by a Highland clan and to be worn by all members of one family — Campbells, Cameron, Grants, etc. There are certain refinements of distinc tion; for instance, separate stripes are used to distinguish a chief or two divisions of the same house. Tartan as a distinguishing clan mark seems to be a survival of totemism. It was so arranged that a man could tell to what district as well as to what clan the wearer belonged. There are also two tartans which do not to any family; one distinguishes an order, the clergy; and the other, a cause, the Jacobite, or Stuart.
Of the total tartans about one-half are of red ground and one-half are black, blue and green. The Rob Roy is the easiest of all to recognize, as it is a simple red and black check. The Black Watch, or Forty-Second, is black, blue and green. It is often mistaken for the Sutherland, similar in design but lighter in color. The MacMillan is easy to recognize for it is pink, yellow and white; and the very striking and handsome Menzies (pronounced Mingies) is scarlet and white. There are only
four tartans with two colors only. The greater number have five colors. Those with black, blue and green ground have stripes, white and red, or yellow and red, or yellow and white. When there are four colors the stripe is white or yellow and red. There are never more than six colors in any tartan, although some of them at first sight appear to have many more. An example is the Ogilvie.
There are three shades of blue and green, but only one shade is used in the same plaid with the exception of the clergy tartan, which has two blues: one is dark and one is light, representing things below and things above. The hunting MacPherson is alone in having gray. Neither violet, nor brown, is employed in tartans, but when blue and red are intermixed in the weaving, they produce a brown effect which is particularly marked in the Erskine, which has but these two colors in equality. The Elliot is the bluest and the MacArthur the greenest of all the tartans.
In Scotland all the big dry-goods houses keep a stock of tartans of all clans, but outside of Scotland they are hard to find. Some Lon don houses keep a complete "set.° The word °set° refers to the size of the design of the tartan and signifies the number of spaces be tween the colored lines to the width of the tartan from 4 to 24. Thus, a "4-set plaid° has 4; a g16-set,° 16; and a "24-set,° 24. All tar tans are made in piece goods and traveling rugs as well as the typically Scotch body wrap, or shawl or %laud," as it is locally called; it is correctly three and one-half yards long and is used throughout Scotland for moun taineering.
regular tartans are made so that in the folds of the kilt and plaid, which are made into quilted or box-plaiting, a particular stripe shall appear. Thus, in the Gordon set the stripe is yellow; in the MacKenzie, white; and so on. The plaid over the shoulders is also adjusted carefully so as to exhibit the distinguishing stripe of the family.