An introduction to Malcolm MacFarlane, of some length, was published in The Celtic Monthly in its July, 1893 issue. Do the arithmetic, and you arrive at an interval fifteen years before Binneas nam Bàrd was published in 1908.
MacFarlane was a regular contributor to The Celtic Monthly, and some of his pre-1908 articles demonstrate how he worked out and put together certain ballads in Binneas nam Bàrd. The 1908 anthology has no commentary or notation whatever concerning MacFarlane's source material. This makes the book easy on the eye and easy to read; and it can be discouraging to a musician or scholar who wants to know where all this music came from.

Therefore, MacFarlane's examples, comments, and citations in The Celtic Monthly can be almost as important to read as the 1908 anthology itself.

Binneas nam Bàrd, English-titled "Bardic Melody," contains 32 songs. An earlier post, from me, on another thread is mistaken. On that post, the count was more like 52 songs. This is incorrect, and the mistake made was that of turning to the alphabetized index, in the beginning of the book, and counting all the entries. This index does not distinguish between the song's opening line and its title; in numerous cases they are one and the same, but in others they are two different things, and the result is that in counting through all the index entries, some songs get counted twice.

The 32 airs in Binneas nam Bàrd are in fact a diverse collection, not all of the same type.
"An t-Eilean Muileach," for example, about the Isle of Mull, is by Dugald MacPhail,
who is not identified or credited with the lyric in MacFarlane's book.

Dugald MacPhail's song is therefore relatively recent.
The staggeringly long ballads that open Binneas nam Bàrd are, on the other hand, relatively recent re-workings of much older material; but again, MacFarlane does not say so in the anthology.