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e Hall, near Edinburgh, and probably also at Coilsfield and Auchinlary; or on a so-called Druidical stone, as on "Long Meg" at Penrith?

Is it true that a long past era--and, if so, at what era--our predecessors in this old Caledonia had nothing but tools and implements of stone, bone, and wood? Are there no gravel-beds in Scotland in which we could probably find large deposits of the celts and other stone weapons--with bored and worked deer-horns, of that distant stone-age--such as have been discovered on the banks of the Somme and the Loire in France? And were the people of that period in Scotland Celtic or pre-Celtic?

We know that in Iona, ten or twelve centuries ago, Greek was written, though we do not know if the Iona library possessed--what Queen Mary had among the sixteen Greek volumes in her library--a copy of Herodotus; but we are particularly anxious to ascertain if the story told by Herodotus of Rhampsinitus, and the robbery of his royal treasury by that "Shifty Lad" "the Master Thief," was in vogue as a popular tale among the Scottish Gaels or Britons in the oldest times? The tale is prevalent in different guises from India to Scotland and Scandinavia among the Aryans, or alleged descendants of Japhet; Herodotus heard it about twenty-three centuries ago in Egypt, and consequently , among the alleged descendants of Shem; and could any Scottish Turanians, as alleged descendants of Ham, in the deputation, tell us whether the tale was also a favourite with them and their forefathers? For if so, then, in consonance with the usual reasoning on this and other popular tales, the story must have been known in the Ark itself, as the sons of Noah separated soon after leaving it, and yet all their descendants were acquainted with this legend. But have these and other such simple tales not originated in many different places, and among many different people, at different times; and have they not an appearance of similarity, merely because, in the course of their development, the earliest products of the human fancy, as well as of the human hand, are always more or less similar under similar circumstances?

If these, and some thousand-and-one similar questions regarding the habits, arts, government, language, etc., of our Primaeval and Mediaeval Forefathers could be at once summarily and satisfactorily answered by any power of "gramarye," then the present and the future Fellows of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland would be saved an incalculable amount of difficult investigation and hard work. But unfortunately I, for one at least, have no belief that any human power can either unsphere the spirits of the dead for a night's drawing-room amusement, or seduce the "wraiths" of our ancestors to "revisit the glimpses of the moon" even for such a loyal and patriotic object as the furtherance of Scottish Archaeology. Nevertheless I doubt not, at the same time, that many of these supposed questions on the dark points of Scottish antiquities will yet betimes be answered more or less satisfactorily. But the answers, if ever obtained, will be obtained by no kind of magic except the magic of accumulated observations, and strict stern facts;--by no necromancy except the necromancy of the cautious combination, comparison, and generalisation of these facts;--by no enchantment, in short, except that special form of enchantment for the advancement of every science which the mighty and potent wizard--Francis Bacon--taught to his fellow-men, when he taught them the spell-like powers of the inductive philosophy.

The data and facts which Scottish antiquaries require to seek out and accumulate for the future furtherance of Scottish Archaeology, lie in many a different direction, waiting and hiding for our search after them. On some few subjects the search has already been keen, and the success correspondingly great. Let me specify one or two instances in illustration of this remark.

As a memorable example, and as a perfect Baconian model for analogous investigations on other corresponding topics--in the way of the full and careful accumulation of all ascertainable premises and data before venturing to dogmatise upon them--let me point to the admirable work of Mr. Stuart on the Sculptured Stones of Scotland--an almost national work, which, according to Mr. Westwood , is "one of the most remarkable contributions to Archaeology which has ever been published in this or any other country."

"Crannoges"--those curious lake-habitations, built on piles of wood, or stockaded islands,--that Herodotus describes in lake Prasias, five or six centuries before the Christian era, constituting dwellings there which were then impregnable to all the military resources of a Persian army,--that Hippocrates tells us were also the types of habitation employed in his day by the Phasians, who sailed to them in single-tree canoes,--that in the same form of houses erected upon tall wooden piles, are still used at the present day as a favourite description of dwelling in the creeks and rivers running into the Straits of Malacca, and on the coasts of Borneo and New Guinea, etc., and the ruins of which have been found in numerous lakes in Ireland, England, Switzerland, Germany, Denmark, etc.;--Crannoges, I say, have been searched for and found also in various lochs in our own country; and the many curious data ascertained with regard to them in Scotland will be given in the next volume of our Society's proceedings by Mr. Joseph Robertson, a gentleman whom we all delight to acknowledge as pre-eminently entitled to wield amongst us the pen of the teacher and master in this as in other departments of Scottish antiquities.

Most extensive architectural data, sketches, and measurements, regarding many of the remains of our oldest ecclesiastical buildings in Scotland , have been collected by the indomitable perseverance and industry of Mr. Muir; and when the work which that most able ecclesiologist has now in the press is published, a great step will doubtless be made in this neglected department of Scottish antiquities.

In addition, however, to the assiduous collection of all ascertainable facts regarding the existing remains of our sculptured stones, our crannoges, and our early ecclesiastical buildings, there are many other departments of Scottish antiquities urgently demanding, at the hands of the numerous zealous antiquaries scattered over the country, full descriptions and accurate drawings of such vestiges of them as are still left--as, for example:--

Good and trustworthy accounts of individual specimens, or groups of specimens, of most of these classes of antiquities, have been already published in our Transactions and Proceedings, and elsewhere. But Scottish Archaeology requires of its votaries as large and exhaustive a collection as possible, with accurate descriptions, and, when possible, with photographs or drawings--or mayhap with models --of all the discoverable forms of each class; as of all the varieties of ancient hill-strongholds; all the varieties of our underground weems, etc. The necessary collection of all ascertainable types, and instances of some of these classes of antiquities, will be, no doubt, a task of much labour and time, and will in most instances require the combined efforts of many and zealous workers. This Society will be ever thankful to any members who will contribute even one or two stones to the required heap. But all past experience has shown that it is useless, and generally even hurtful, to attempt to frame hypotheses upon one, or even upon a few specimens only. In Archaeology, as in other sciences, we must have full and accurate premises before we can hope to make full and accurate deductions. It is needless and hopeless for us to expect clear, correct, and philosophic views of the character and of the date and age of such archaeological objects as I have enumerated, except by following the triple process of assiduously collecting together as many instances as possible of each class of our antiquities; carefully comparing these instances with each other, so as to ascertain all their resemblances and differences; and contrasting them with similar remains in other cognate countries, where--in some instances, perhaps--there may exist, what possibly is wanting with us, the light of written history to guide us in elucidating the special subjects that may happen to be engaging our investigations--ever remembering that our Scottish Archaeology is but a small, a very small, segment of the general circle of the Archaeology of Europe and of the World.

The same remarks, which I have just ventured to make, as to the proper mode of investigating the classes of our larger archaeological subjects, hold equally true also of those other classes of antiquities of a lighter and more portable type, which we have collected in our museums; such, for instance, as the ancient domestic tools, instruments, personal ornaments, weapons, etc., of stone, flint, bone, bronze, iron, silver, and gold, which our ancestors used; the clay and bronze vessels which they employed in cooking and carrying their food; the handmills with which they ground their corn; the whorls and distaffs with which they span, and the stuff and garments spun by them, etc. etc. It is only by collecting, combining, and comparing all the individual instances of each antiquarian object of this kind--all ascertainable specimens, for example, of our Scottish stone celts and knives; all ascertainable specimens of our clay vessels; of our leaf-shaped swords; of our metallic armlets; of our grain rubbers and stone-querns, etc. etc.--and by tracing the history of similar objects in other allied countries, that we will read aright the tales which these relics--when once properly interrogated--are capable of telling us of the doings, the habits, and the thoughts of our distant predecessors.

It is on this same broad and great ground--of the indispensable necessity of a large and perfect collection of individual specimens of all kinds of antiquities for safe, sure, and successful deduction--that we plead for the accumulation of such objects in our own or in other public antiquarian collections. And in thus pleading with the Scottish public for the augmentation and enrichment of our Museum, by donations of all kinds, however slight and trivial they may seem to the donors, we plead for what is not any longer the property of this Society, but what is now the property of the nation. The Museum has been gifted over by the Society of Antiquaries to the Government--it now belongs, not to us, but to Scotland--and we unhesitatingly call upon every true-hearted Scotsman to contribute, whenever it is in his power, to the extension of this Museum, as the best record and collection of the ancient archaeological and historical memorials of our native land. We call for such a central general ingathering and repository of Scottish antiquities for another reason. Single specimens and examples of archaeological relics are, in the hands of a private individual, generally nought but mere matters of idle curiosity and wild conjecture; while all of them become of use, and sometimes of great moment, when placed in a public collection beside their fellows. Like stray single words or letters that have dropt from out the Book of Time, they themselves, individually, reveal nothing, but when placed alongside of other words and letters from the same book, they gradually form--under the fingers of the archaeologist--into lines, and sentences, and paragraphs, which reveal secret and stirring legends of the workings of the human mind, and human hand, in ages of which, perchance, we have no other existing memorials.

In attempting to read the cypher of these legends aright, let us guard against one fault which was unfortunately too often committed in former days, and which is perhaps sometimes committed still. Let us not fall into the mistake of fancying that everything antiquarian, which we do not see at first sight the exact use of, must necessarily be something very mysterious. Old distaff-whorls, armlets, etc., have, in this illogical spirit, been sometimes described as Druidical amulets and talismen; ornamented rings and bosses from the ancient rich Celtic horse-harness, discovered in sepulchral barrows, have been published as Druidical astronomical instruments; and in the last century some columnar rock arrangement in Orkney was gravely adduced by Toland as a Druidical pavement. It is this craving after the mysterious, this reprehensible irrationalism, that has brought, indeed, the whole subject of Druidism into much modern contempt with many archaeologists. No doubt Druidism is a most interesting and a most important subject for due and calm investigation, and the facts handed down to us in regard to it by Caesar, Diodorus, Mela, Strabo, Pliny, and other classic and hagiological authors, are full of the gravest archaeological bearings; but no doubt also many antiquarian relics, both large and small, have been provokingly called Druidical, merely because their origin and object were unknown. We have not, for instance, a particle of direct evidence for the too common belief that our stone circles were temples which the Druids used for worship; or that our cromlechs were their sacrificial altars. In fact, formerly the equanimity of the old theoretical class of archaeologists was disturbed by these leviathan notions about Druids and Druidesses as much as the marine zoology of the poor sailor was long disturbed by his leviathan notions about sea-serpents and mermaids.

In our archaeological inquiries into the probable uses and import of all doubtful articles in our museums or elsewhere, let us proceed upon a plan of the very opposite kind. Let us, like the geologists, try always, when working with such problems, to understand the past by reasoning from the present. Let us study backwards from the known to the unknown. In this way we can easily come to understand, for example, how our ancestors made those single-tree canoes, which have been found so often in Scotland, by observing how the Red Indian, partly by fire and partly by the hatchet, makes his analogous canoe at the present day; how our flint arrows were manufactured, when we see the process by which the present Esquimaux manufactures his; how our predecessors fixed and used their stone knives and hatchets, when we see how the Polynesian fixes and uses his stone knives and hatchets now; how, in short, matters sped in respect to household economy, dress, work, and war, in this old Caledonia of ours, during even the so-called Stone Age, when we reflect upon and study the modes in which matters are conducted in that new Caledonia in the Pacific--the inhabitants of which knew nothing of metals till they came in contact with Europeans, not many years ago; how, in long past days, hand and home-made clay vessels were the chief or only vessels used for cooking and all culinary purposes, seeing that in one or two parts of the Hebrides this is actually the state of matters still.

Besides the antiquarian relics of a visible and tangible form to which I have adverted, as demanding investigation and collection on our part, there are various antiquarian relics of a non-material type in Scottish Archaeology which this Society might perhaps do much to collect and preserve, through the agency of active committees, and the assistance of many of our countrymen, who, I doubt not, could be easily incited to assist us in the required work. One of these matters is a fuller collection and digest than we yet possess of the old superstitious beliefs and practices of our forefathers. And certainly some strange superstitions do remain, or at least lately did remain, among us. The sacrifice, for example, of the cock and other animals for recovery from epilepsy and convulsions, is by no means extinct in some Highland districts. In old Pagan and Mithraic times we know that the sacrifice of the ox was common. I have myself often listened to the account given by one near and dear to me, who was in early life personally engaged in the offering up and burying of a poor live cow as a sacrifice to the Spirit of the Murrain. This occurred within twenty miles of the metropolis of Scotland. In the same district a relative of mine bought a farm not very many years ago. Among his first acts, after taking possession, was the inclosing a small triangular corner of one of the fields within a stone wall. The corner cut off--and which still remains cut off--was the "Goodman's Croft"--an offering to the Spirit of Evil, in order that he might abstain from ever blighting or damaging the rest of the farm. The clergyman of the parish, in lately telling me the circumstance, added, that my kinsman had been, he feared, far from acting honestly with Lucifer, after all, as the corner which he had cut off for the "Goodman's" share was perhaps the most worthless and sterile spot on the whole property. Some may look upon such superstitions and superstitious practices as matters utterly vulgar and valueless in themselves; but in the eyes of the archaeologist they become interesting and important when we remember that the popular superstitions of Scotland, as of other countries, are for the most part true antiquarian vestiges of the pagan creeds and customs of our earlier ancestors; our present Folk-lore being merely in general a degenerated and debased form of the highest mythological and medical lore of very distant times. A collection of the popular superstitions and practices of the different districts of Scotland now, ere they melt and disappear totally before the light and the pride of modern knowledge, would yet perhaps afford important materials for regaining much lost antiquarian knowledge. For as the palaeontologist can sometimes reconstruct in full the types of extinct animals from a few preserved fragments of bones, possibly some future archaeological Cuvier may one day be able to reconstruct from these mythological fragments, and from other sources, far more distinct figures and forms than we at present possess of the heathen faith and rites of our forefathers.

Perhaps a more important matter still would be the collection, from every district and parish of Scotland, of local lists of the oldest names of the hills, rivers, rocks, farms, and other places and objects; and this all the more that in this age of alteration and change many of these names are already rapidly passing away. Yet the possession of a Scottish antiquarian gazetteer or map of this kind would not only enable us to identify many localities mentioned in our older deeds and charters, but more--the very language to which these names belong would, perhaps, as philological ethnology advances, betimes serve as guides to lead our successors, if they do not lead us, to obtain clearer views than we now have of the people that aboriginally inhabited the different districts of our country, and the changes which occurred from time to time in these districts in the races which successively had possession of them. In this, as in other parts of the world, our mountains and other natural objects often obstinately retain, in despite of all subsequent changes and conquests, the appellations with which they were originally baptised by the aboriginal possessors of the soil; as, for example, in three or four of the rivers which enter the Forth nearest to us here--viz., the Avon, the Amond, and the Esk on this side; and the Dour, at Aberdour, on the opposite side of the Firth. For these are all old Aryan names, to be found as river appellations in many other spots of the world, and in some of its oldest dialects. The Amond or Avon is a simple modification of the present word of the Cymric "Afon," for "river," and we have all from our schooldays known it under its Latin form of "Amnis." The Esk, in its various modifications of Exe, Axe, Uisk, etc., is the present Welsh word, "Uisk," for "water," and possibly the earliest form "asqua," of the Latin noun "aqua." Again, the noun "Dour"--Douro--so common an appellative for rivers in many parts of Europe, is, according to some of our best etymologists, identical with, or of the same Aryan source as the "Uda," or water, of the sanskrit, "" of the Greeks, and the "Dwr" or "Dour" of the Cambrian and Gael. The archaeologist, like the Red Indian when tracking his foe, teaches himself to observe and catch up every possible visible trace of the trail of archaic man; but, like the Red Indian also, he now and again lays his ear on the ground to listen for any sounds indicating the presence and doings of him who is the object of his pursuit. The old words which he hears whispered in the ancient names of natural objects and places supply the antiquary with this kind of audible archaeological evidence. For, when cross-questioned at the present day as to their nomenclature, many, I repeat, of our rivers and lakes, of our hills and headlands, do, in their mere names, telegraph back to us, along mighty distances of time, significant specimens of the tongue spoken by the first inhabitants of their district--in this respect resembling the doting and dying octogenarian that has left in early life the home of his fathers, to sojourn in the land of the stranger, and who remembers and babbles at last--ere the silver cord of memory is utterly and finally loosed--one language only, and that some few words merely, in the long unspoken tongue which he first learned to lisp in his earliest infancy.

The special sources and lines of research from which Scottish inductive Archaeology may be expected to derive the additional data and facts which it requires for its elucidation are many and various. Let me here briefly allude to two only, and these two of rather opposite characters,--viz. , researches beneath the surface of the earth; and , researches among olden works and manuscripts.

In times past Scottish Archaeology has already gained much from digging; and in times to come it is doubtless destined to gain yet infinitely more from a systematised use of this mode of research. For the truth is, that beneath the surface of the earth on which we tread--often not above two or three feet below that surface, sometimes not deeper than the roots of our plants and trees--there undoubtedly lie, in innumerable spots and places,--buried, and waiting only for disinterment,--antiquarian relics of the most valuable and important character. The richest and rarest treasures contained in some of our antiquarian museums have been exhumed by digging; and that digging has been frequently of the most accidental and superficial kind--like the discovery of the silver mines of Potosi through the chance uprooting of a shrub by the hand of a climbing traveller.

The magnificent twisted torc, containing some ?50 worth of pure gold, which was exhibited in Edinburgh in 1856, in the Museum of the Archaeological Institute, was found in 1848 in Needwood Forest, lying on the top of some fresh mould which had been turned up by a fox, in excavating for himself a new earth-hole. Formerly, on the sites of the old British villages in Wiltshire, the moles, as Sir Richard Hoare tells us, were constantly throwing up to the surface numerous coins and fragments of pottery. We are indebted to the digging propensities of another animal for the richest collection of silver ornaments which is contained in our Museum: For the great hoard of massive silver brooches, torcs, ingots, Cufic and other coins, etc., weighing some 16 lbs. in all, which was found in 1857 in the Bay of Skaill in Orkney, was discovered in consequence of several small pieces of the deposit having been accidentally uncovered by the burrowings of the busy rabbit. That hoard itself is interesting on this other account, that it is one of 130 or more similar silver deposits, almost all found by digging, that have latterly been discovered, stretching from Orkney, along the shores and islands of the Baltic, through Russia southward, towards the seat of the government of those Eastern Caliphs who issued the Cufic coins which generally form part of these collections--this long track being apparently the commercial route along which those merchants passed, who, from the seventh or eighth to the eleventh century, carried on the traffic which then subsisted between Asia and the north of Europe.

The spade and plough of the husbandman are constantly disinterring relics of high value to the antiquary and numismatist. The matchless collection of gold ornaments contained in the Museum of the Irish Academy has been almost entirely discovered in the course of common agricultural operations. The pickaxe of the ditcher, and of the canal and railway navvies, have often also, by their accidental strokes, uncovered rich antiquarian treasures. The remarkable massive silver chain, ninety-three ounces in weight, which we have in our Museum, was found about two feet below the surface, when the Caledonian Canal was dug in 1808. One of the largest gold armlets ever discovered in Scotland was disinterred at Slateford in cutting the Caledonian Railway. Our Museum contains only a model of it; for the original--like many similar relics, when they consisted of the precious metals--was sold for its mere weight in bullion, and lost--at least to Archaeology--in the melting-pot of the jeweller, in consequence of the former unfortunate state of our law of treasure-trove. And it cannot perhaps be stated too often or too loudly, that such continued wanton destruction of these relics is now so far provided against; for by a Government ordinance, the finder of any relics in ancient coins, or in the precious metals, is now entitled by law, on delivering them up to the Crown for our National Museum, to claim "the full intrinsic value" of them from the Sheriff of the district in which they chance to be discovered--a most just and proper enactment, through the aid of which many such relics will no doubt be henceforth properly preserved.

But the results of digging to which I have referred are, as I have already said, the results merely of accidental digging. From a systematised application of the same means of discovery, in fit and proper localities, with or without previous ground-probing, Archaeology is certainly entitled to expect most valuable consequences. The spade and pickaxe are become as indispensable aids in some forms of archaeological, as the hammer is in some forms of geological research. The great antiquarian treasures garnered up in our sepulchral barrows and olden kistvaen cemeteries, are only to be recovered to antiquarian science by digging, and by digging, too, of the most careful and methodised kind. For in such excavations it is a matter of moment to note accurately every possible separate fact as to the position, state, etc., of all the objects exposed; as well as to search for, handle, and gather these objects most carefully. In excavating, some years ago, a large barrow in the Phoenix Park at Dublin, two entire skeletons were discovered within the chamber of the stone cromlech which formed the centre of the sepulchral mound. A flint knife, a flint arrow-head, and a small fibula of bone were found among the rubbish, along with some cinerary urns; but no bronze or other metallic implements. The human beings buried there had lived in the so-called Stone Period of the Danish archaeologists. Some hard bodies were observed immediately below the head of one of the skeletons, and by very cautious and careful picking away of the surrounding earth, there was traced around the neck of each a complete necklace formed of the small sea-shells of the Nerita, with a perforation in each shell to admit of a string composed of vegetable fibres being passed through them. Without due vigilance how readily might these interesting relics have been overlooked!

The spade and mattock, however, have subserved, and will subserve, other important archaeological purposes besides the opening of ancient cemeteries. They will probably enable us yet to solve to some extent the vexed question of the true character of our so-called "Druidical circles" and "Druidical stones," by proving to us that one of their uses at least was sepulchral. The bogs and mosses of Ireland, Denmark, and other countries, have, when dug into, yielded up great stores of interesting antiquarian objects--usually wonderfully preserved by the qualities of the soil in which they were immersed--as stone and metallic implements, portions of primaeval costume, combs, and other articles of the toilet, pieces of domestic furniture, old and buried wooden houses, and even, as in the alleged case of Queen Gunhild, and other "bogged" or "pitted" criminals, human bodies astonishingly entire, and covered with the leathern and other dresses in which they died. All this forms a great mine of antiquarian research, in which little or nothing has yet been accomplished in Scotland. It is only by due excavations that we can hope to acquire a proper analytical knowledge of the primaeval abodes of our ancestors,--whether these abodes were in underground "weems," or in those hitherto neglected and yet most interesting objects of Scottish Archaeology, namely, our archaic villages and towns, the vestiges and marks of which lie scattered over our plains and mountain sides--always near a stream, or lake, or good spring--usually marked by groups of shallow pits or excavations and a few nettles--generally protected and surrounded on one or more sides by a rath or earth-wall--often near a hill-fort--and having attached to them, at some distance in the neighbourhood, stone graves, and sometimes, as on the grounds about Morton Hall, monoliths and barrows.

Last year we had detailed at length to the Society the very remarkable results which Mr. Neish had obtained by simple persevering digging upon the hill of the Laws in Forfarshire, exposing, as his excavations have done, over the whole top of the hill, extensive Cyclopic walls of several feet in height, formerly buried beneath the soil, and of such strange and puzzling forms as to defy as yet any definite conjecture of their character. No doubt similar works, with similar remains of implements, ornaments, querns, charred corn, etc., will yet be found by similar diggings on other Scottish hills; and at length we may obtain adequate data for fixing their nature and object, and perhaps even their date. Certainly every Scotch antiquary must heartily wish that the excellent example of earnest and enlightened research set by Mr. Neish was followed by others of his brother landholders in Scotland.

At the present time the sites and remains of some Roman cities in England are being restored to light in this way--as the old city of Uriconium , where already many curious discoveries have rewarded the quiet investigations that are being carried on;--and Borcovicus in Northumberland , one of the stations placed along the magnificent old Roman wall which still exists in wonderful preservation in its neighbourhood, and itself a Roman town, left comparatively so entire that "Sandy Gordon" described it long ago as the most remarkable and magnificent Roman station in the whole island, while Dr. Stukely spoke of it enthusiastically as the "Tadmor of Britain." I was lately told by Mr. Longueville Jones, that in the vicinity of Caerleon--the ancient Isca Silurum of the Roman Itinerary--the slim sharpened iron rod used as a ground-probe had detected at different distances a row of buried Roman houses and villas, extending from the old city into the country for nearly three miles in length. Here, as elsewhere, a rich antiquarian mine waits for the diggings of the antiquary; and elsewhere, as here, the ground-probe will often point out the exact spots that should be dug, with far more certainty than the divining rod of any Dousterswivel ever pointed out hidden hoards of gold or hidden springs of water.

But it is necessary, as I have already hinted, to seek and hope for additional archaeological materials in literary as well as in subterraneous researches. And certainly, one especial deficiency which we have, to deplore in Scottish Archaeology is the almost total want of written documents and annals of the primaeval and early mediaeval portions of Scottish history. The antiquaries of England and Ireland are much more fortunate in this respect than we are; for they possess a greater abundance of early documents than we can boast of. Indeed, after Tacitus' interesting account of the first Roman invasion of Scotland under Agricola, and a few meagre allusions to, and statements regarding this country and its inhabitants by some subsequent classic authors, we have, for a course of seven or eight centuries, almost no written records of any authority to refer to. The chief, if not the only, exceptions to this general remark, consist of a few scattered entries bearing upon Scotland in the Irish Annals--as in those of Tighernach and Ulster; some facts related by Bede; some statements given in the lives and legends of the early Scottish, Welsh, and Irish saints; and various copies of the list of the Pictish kings.

The antiquaries of Scotland would heartily rejoice over the discovery of lost documents far less ancient than these. Perhaps I could name two or three of our colleagues who would perfectly revel over the recovery, for instance, of one or two leaves of those old Pictish annals that still existed in the twelfth century, and in which, among other matters, was a brief account of the solemn ceremony which took place when King Hungus endowed the church of St. Andrews, in presence of twelve members of the Pictish regal race, with a grant of many miles of broad acres, and solemnly placed with his royal hands on the altar of the church a piece of fresh turf in symbolisation of his royal land-gift. We all deplore that we possess no longer what the Abbot Ailred of Rievaulx, and the monk Joceline of Furness possessed, namely, biographies, apparently written in the old language of our country, of two of our earliest Scottish saints--St. Ninian of Whithorn, and St. Kentigern of Glasgow; and we grieve that we have lost even that Life of St. Serf, which, along with a goodly list of service and other books , was placed, before the time of the Reformation, in the choir of the Cathedral of Glasgow, as we know from the catalogue which has been preserved of its library.

But let us not at the same time forget that Scottish archaeological documents, as ancient as any of these, have been latterly rediscovered, and rediscovered occasionally in the most accidental way; and let us not, therefore, despair of further, and perhaps even of greater success in the same line. Certainly the greatest of recent events in Scottish Archaeology was the casual finding, within the last two or three years, in one of the public libraries at Cambridge, of a manuscript of the Gospels, which had formerly belonged to the Abbey of Deer, in Aberdeenshire. The margin and blank vellum of this ancient volume contain, in the Celtic language, some grants and entries reaching much beyond the age of any of our other Scottish charters and chronicles. The oldest example of written Scottish Gaelic that was previously known was not earlier than the sixteenth century. Portions of the Deer Manuscript have been pronounced by competent scholars to be seven centuries older.

The most ancient known collection of the laws of Scotland--a manuscript written about 1270--was detected in the public library of Berne, and lately restored to this country. In 1824, Mr. Thomson, a schoolmaster at Ayr, picked up, on an old bookstall in that town, a valuable manuscript collection of Scotch burghal laws written upwards of four centuries ago.

Sometimes, as in this last instance, documents of great value in Scottish Archaeology have made narrow escapes from utter loss and destruction.

I was told by the late Mr. Thomas Thomson--a gentleman to whom we are all indebted for promoting and systematising our studies--that a miscellaneous, but yet in some points valuable collection of old vellum manuscripts was left, at the beginning of the present century, by a poor peripatetic Scottish tailor, who could not read one word of the old black letter documents which he spent his life and his purse in collecting. Being a visionary claimant to one of the dormant Scottish peerages, he buoyed himself up with the bright hope that some clever lawyer would yet find undoubted proofs of his claims in some of the written parchments which he might procure. Sir Robert Cotton is said to have discovered one of the original vellum copies of the Magna Charta in the shop of another tailor, who, holding it in his hand, was preparing to cut up this charter of the liberties of England into tape for measuring some of England's sons for coats and trousers. The missing manuscript of the History of Scotland, from the Restoration to 1681, which was written by Sir George Mackenzie, the King's Advocate, was rescued from a mass of old paper that had been sold for shop purposes to a grocer in Edinburgh. Some fragments of the Privy Council Records of Scotland--now preserved in the General Register House--were bought among waste snuff-paper. Occasionally even a very small preserved fragment of an ancient document has proved of importance. Mr. Robertson informs me that, in editing the old Canons of the Scottish Church, he has derived considerable service from a single leaf of a contemporary record of the Canons of the sixteenth century, which had been used and preserved in the old binding of a book. This single leaf is the only bit of manuscript of the Scotch sixteenth century Canons that is known to exist in Scotland.

In 1794 eight official volumes of the Scottish Secretary of State's Register of Seisins were discovered in a bookseller's shop in Edinburgh, after they had remained concealed for more than 185 years.

Contested points in Scottish Archaeology and history have been occasionally settled by manuscript discoveries that were perfectly accidental.

After the blowing up of the Kirk of the Field, the only one of Darnley's servants that escaped was brought by the Earl of Murray before the English Council, and there gave evidence, implying that Queen Mary--that ever-interesting princess, who has been doubtlessly both over-decried by her foes and over-praised by her friends--was cognisant of the intended murder of her husband, inasmuch as, beforehand, she ordered an old bed to be placed in Darnley's room, and the richer bed that previously stood in it to be removed. Nearly three hundred years after that dark and sordid insinuation was made, a roll of papers was casually found, during a search among some legal documents of the early part of the seventeenth century, and one of the leaves in that roll contained a contemporary and authenticated official return of the royal furniture lost by the blowing up of the King's residence. Among other items, this leaf proved, beyond the possibility of further cavil, that the bed which stood in Darnley's room was, up to the time of his death, unchanged, and was not, as alleged by Mary's enemies, an old and worthless piece of furniture, but, on the contrary, was "a bed of violet velvet, with double hangings, braided with gold and silver ."

The finest old Teutonic cross in Scotland is the well-known pillar which stands in the churchyard of Ruthwell, in Dumfriesshire. It was ignominiously thrown down, by a decree of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, in 1642; but its broken fragments were collected, as far as possible, and the cross itself again erected, by the late clergyman of the parish, Dr. Henry Duncan, who published in the Transactions of this Society correct drawings of the Runic inscription on this ancient monument. Two Danish antiquaries, Repp and Finn Magnusen, tried to read these Runic lines, and tortured them into very opposite, and let me simply add, very ridiculous meanings, about a grant of land and cows in Ashlafardhal, and Offa, a kinsman of Woden, transferring property to Ashloff, etc., all which they duly published. That great antiquary and Saxon scholar, the late Mr. Kemble, then happened to turn his attention to the Ruthwell inscription, and saw the runes or language to be Anglo-Saxon, and in no ways Scandinavian, as had been supposed. He found that the inscription consisted of a poem, or extracts from a poem, in Anglo-Saxon, in which the stone cross, speaking in the first person, described itself as overwhelmed with sorrow because it had borne Christ raised upon it at His crucifixion, had been stained with the blood poured from His side, and had witnessed His agonies,--

"I raised the powerful King, The Lord of the heavens; I dared not fall down," etc. etc.

Who was to decide between the very diverse opinions, and still more diverse readings, of this inscription by the English antiquary and his Danish rivals? An accidental discovery in an old manuscript may be justly considered as having settled the whole question. For, two or three years after Mr. Kemble had published his reading of the inscription, the identical Anglo-Saxon poem which he had found written on the Ruthwell cross was casually discovered in an extended form under the title of the "Dream of the Rood." The old MS. volume of Saxon homilies and religious lays from which the book containing it was printed, was found by Dr. Blum in a library at Vercelli, in Italy.

With these rambling remarks I have already detained you far too long. Ere concluding, however, bear with me for a minute or two longer, while I shortly speak of one clamant subject--viz. the strong necessity of this Society, and of every Scotsman, battling and trying to prevent, if possible, the further demolition of the antiquarian relics scattered over Scotland.

Various human agencies have been long busy in the destruction and obliteration of our antiquarian earth and stone works. At no period has this process of demolition gone on in Scotland more rapidly and ruthlessly than during the last fifty or a hundred years. That tide of agricultural improvement which has passed over the country, has, in its utilitarian course, swept away--sometimes inevitably, often most needlessly--the aggers and ditches of ancient camps, sepulchral barrows and mounds, stone circles and cairns, earth-raths, and various other objects of deep antiquarian interest. Indeed, the chief antiquarian remains of this description which have been left on the surface of our soil are to be found on our mountain-tops, on our moors, or in our woods, where the very sterility or inaccessibility of the spot, or the kind protection and sympathy of the old forest-trees, have saved them, for a time at least, from reckless ruin and annihilation. Some of the antiquarian memorials that I allude to would have endured for centuries to come, had it not been for human interference and devastation. For, in the demolition of these works of archaic man, the hand of man has too generally proved both a busier and a less scrupulous agent than the hand of time.

But other and older agents have overturned and uprooted the memorials transmitted down from ancient times, with as much wantonness as the railways. Towards the middle of the last century the Government of the day ordered many miles of the gigantic old Roman wall, which stretches across Northumberland and Cumberland, to be tossed over and pounded into road metal. About the same time a Scottish proprietor--with a Vandalism which cast a stigma on his order--pulled down that antique enigmatical building, "Arthur's Oven," in order to build, with its ashlar walls, a mill-dam across the Carron. At its next flood the indignant Carron carried away the mill-dam, and buried for ever in the depths of its own water-course those venerable stones which were begrudged any longer by the proprietor of the soil the few feet of ground which they had occupied for centuries on its banks.

Almost all the primaeval stone circles and cromlechs which existed in the middle and southern districts of Scotland have been cast down and removed. The only two cromlechs in the Lothians, the stones of which have not been removed, are at Ratho and Kipps; and though the stones have been wantonly pulled down, they could readily be restored, and certainly deserve to be so. In 1813 the cromlech at Kipps was seen by Sir John Dalzell still standing upright. In describing it, in the beginning of the last century, Sir Robert Sibbald states that near this Kipps cromlech was a circle of stones, with a large stone or two in the middle; and he adds, "many such may be seen all over the country." They have all disappeared; and latterly the stones of the Kipps circle have been themselves removed and broken up, to build, apparently, some neighbouring field-walls, though there was abundance of stones in the vicinity equally well suited for the purpose.

Among the most valuable of our ancient Scottish monuments are certainly our Sculptured Stones. Most of them, however, and some even in late times, have been sadly mutilated and destroyed, to a greater or less degree, by human hands, and converted to the most base uses. The stone at Hilton of Cadboll, remarkable for its elaborate sculpture and ornamental tracery, has had one of its sides smoothed and obliterated in order that a modern inscription might be cut upon it to commemorate "Alexander Duff and His Thrie Wives." The beautiful sculptured stone of Golspie has been desecrated in the same way. Only two of these ancient sculptured stones are known south of the Forth. One of them has been preserved by having been used as a window-lintel in the church of Abercorn--the venerable episcopal see, in the seventh century, of Trumwine, the Bishop of the Picts. The other serves the purpose of a foot-bridge within a hundred yards of the spot where we are met; and it is to be hoped that its proprietors will allow this ancient stone to be soon removed from its present ignominious situation to an honoured place in our Museum. I saw, during last autumn, in Anglesey, a stone bearing a very ancient Romano-British legend, officiating as one of the posts of a park gate--a situation in which several such inscribed stones have been found. Still more lately, I was informed of the large central monolith in a stone circle, not far from the Scottish border, having been thrown down and split up into seven pairs of field gate-posts.

"Standing-stones"--the old names of which gave their appellations to the very manors on which they stood--have been repeatedly demolished in Scotland. An obelisk of thirteen feet in height, and imparting its name to a landed estate in Kincardineshire, was recently thrown down; and a large monolith, which lent its old, venerable name to a property and mansion within three or four miles of Edinburgh, was, within the memory of some living witnesses, uprooted and totally demolished when the direction of the turnpike road in its neighbourhood happened to be altered.

A healthier and finer feeling in regard to the propriety of preserving such national antiquities as I have referred to, subsists, I believe, in the heart of the general public of Scotland, than perhaps those who are their superiors in riches and rank generally give them credit for. Within this century the standing-stones of Stennis in Orkney were attacked, and two or three of them overthrown by an iconoclast; but the people in the neighbourhood resented and arrested the attempt by threatening to set fire to the house and corn of the barbaric aggressor. After the passing of the Parliamentary Reform Bill, during a keen contest for the representation of a large Scottish county, there was successfully urged in the public journals against one of the candidates, the damaging fact that one of his forefathers had deliberately committed one of the gross acts of barbarism which I have already specified, in the needless destruction, in a distant part of Scotland, of one of the smallest but most interesting of Scottish antiquarian relics; and the voters at the polling-booths showed that they deemed a family, however rich and estimable, unfit to be intrusted with the parliamentary guardianship of the county, which had outraged public feeling by wantonly pulling down one of the oldest stone memorials in the kingdom.

In the name of this Society, and in the name of my fellow-countrymen generally, I here solemnly protest against the perpetration of any more acts of useless and churlish Vandalism, in the needless destruction and removal of our Scottish antiquarian remains. The hearts of all leal Scotsmen, overflowing as they do with a love of their native land, must ever deplore the unnecessary demolition of all such early relics and monuments as can in any degree contribute to the recovery and restoration of the past history of our country and of our ancestors. These ancient relics and monuments are truly, in one strong sense, national property; for historically they belong to Scotland and to Scotsmen in general, more than they belong to the individual proprietors upon whose ground they accidentally happen to be placed. There is an Act of Parliament against the wilful defacing and demolition of public monuments; and, perhaps the Kilkenny Archaeological Association were right when they threatened to indite with the penalties of "misdemeanour" under that statute, any person who should wantonly and needlessly destroy the old monumental and architectural relics of his country. Many of these relics might have brought only a small price indeed in the money-market, while yet they were of a national and historical value which it would be difficult to estimate. For, when once swept away, their full replacement is impossible. They cannot be purchased back with gold. Their deliberate and ruthless annihilation is, in truth, so far the annihilation of the ancient records of the kingdom. If any member of any ancient family among us needlessly destroyed some of the olden records of that one family, how bitterly, and how justly too, would he be denounced and despised by its members? But assuredly antiquarian monuments, as the olden records of a whole realm, are infinitely more valuable than the records of any individual family in that realm. Let us fondly hope and trust that a proper spirit of patriotism--that every feeling of good, generous, and gentlemanly taste--will insure and hallow the future consecration of all such Scottish antiquities as still remain--small fragments only though they may be of the antiquarian treasures that once existed in our land.

Time, like the Sibyl, who offered her nine books of destiny to the Roman king, has been destroying, century after century, one after another of the rich volumes of antiquities which she formerly tendered to the keeping of our Scottish fathers. But though, unhappily, our predecessors, like King Tarquin, rejected and scorned the rich antiquarian treasures which existed in their days, let us not now, on that account, despise or decline to secure the three books of them that still perchance remain. On the contrary,--like the priests appointed by the Roman authorities to preserve and study the Sibylline records which had escaped destruction,--let this Society carefully guard and cherish those antiquities of our country which yet exist, and let them strive to teach themselves and their successors to decipher and interpret aright the strange things and thoughts that are written on those Sibylline leaves of Scottish Archaeology which Fate has still spared for them. Working earnestly, faithfully, and lovingly in this spirit, let us not despair that, as the science of Archaeology gradually grows and evolves, this Society may yet, in full truth, restore Scotland to antiquity, and antiquity to Scotland.

FOOTNOTES:

ON AN OLD STONE-ROOFED CELL OR ORATORY IN THE ISLAND OF INCHCOLM.

Among the islands scattered along the Firth of Forth, one of the most interesting is the ancient Aemonia, Emona, St. Columba's Isle, or St. Colme's Inch--the modern Inchcolm. The island is not large, being little more than half-a-mile in length, and about a hundred and fifty yards across at its broadest part. At either extremity it is elevated and rocky; while in its intermediate portion it is more level, though still very rough and irregular, and at one point--a little to the east of the old monastic buildings--it becomes so flat and narrow that at high tides the waters of the Forth meet over it. Inchcolm lies nearly six miles north-west from the harbour of Granton, or is about eight or nine miles distant from Edinburgh; and of the many beautiful spots in the vicinity of the Scottish metropolis, there is perhaps none which surpasses this little island in the charming and picturesque character of the views that are obtained in various directions from it.

But without dwelling on these and other well-known facts and fictions in the history of Inchcolm, let me state,--for the statement has, as we shall afterwards see, some bearing upon the more immediate object of this notice,--that this island is one of the few spots in the vicinity of Edinburgh that has been rendered classical by the pen of Shakspeare. In the second scene of the opening act of the tragedy of Macbeth, the Thane of Ross comes as a hurried messenger from the field of battle to King Duncan, and reports that Duncan's own rebellious subjects and the invading Scandinavians had both been so completely defeated by his generals, Macbeth and Banquo, that the Norwegians craved for peace:--

"Sueno, the Norways' King, craves composition; Nor would we deign him burial of his men Till he disbursed, at Saint Colmes Inch, Ten thousand dollars to our general use."

Inchcolm is the only island of the east coast of Scotland which derives its distinctive designation from the great Scottish saint. But more than one island on our western shores bears the name of St. Columba; as, for example, St. Colme's Isle, in Loch Erisort, and St. Colm's Isle in the Minch, in the Lewis; the island of Kolmbkill, at the head of Loch Arkeg, in Inverness-shire; Eilean Colm, in the parish of Tongue; and, above all, Icolmkill, or Iona itself, the original seat and subsequent great centre of the ecclesiastic power of St. Columba and his successors. An esteemed antiquarian friend, to whom I lately mentioned the preceding reference to Inchcolm by Shakspeare, at once maintained that the St. Colme's Isle in Macbeth was Iona. Indeed, some of the modern editors of Shakspeare, carried away by the same view, have printed the line which I have quoted thus:--

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