ITS PAST AND ITS FUTURE WORK.[8]

It has become a practice of late years in this Society for one of the

Vice-Presidents to read an Annual Address on some topic or topics

connected with Archaeology. I appear here to-night more in compliance

with this custom than with any hope of being able to state aught to you

that is likely to prove either of adequate interest or of adequate

importance for such an occasion.

In making this admission, I am fully aware that the deficiency lies in

myself, and not in my subject. For truly there are few studies which

offer so many tempting fields of observation and comment as Archaeology.

Indeed, the aim and the groundwork of the studies of the antiquary form

a sufficient guarantee for the interest with which these studies are

invested. For the leading object and intent of all his pursuits is--MAN,

and man's ways and works, his habits and thoughts, from the earliest

dates at which we can find his traces and tracks upon the earth, onward

and forwards along the journey of past time. During this long journey,

man has everywhere left scattered behind and around him innumerable

relics, forming so many permanent impressions and evidences of his march

and progress. These impressions and evidences the antiquary searches

for and studies--in the changes which have in successive eras taken

place (as proved by their existing and discoverable remains) in the

materials and forms of the implements and tools which man has from the

earliest times used in the chase and in agriculture; in the weapons

which he has employed in battle; in the habitations which he has dwelt

in during peace, and in the earth-works and stone-works which he has

raised during war; in the dresses and ornaments which he has worn; in

the varying forms of religious faith which he has held, and the deities

that he has worshipped; in the sacred temples and fanes which he has

reared; in the various modes in which he has disposed of the dead; in

the laws and governments under which he has lived; in the arts which he

has cultivated; in the sculptures which he has carved; in the coins and

medals which he has struck; in the inscriptions which he has cut; in the

records which he has written; and in the character and type of the

languages in which he has spoken. All the markings and relics of man, in

the dim and distant past, which industry and science can possibly

extract from these and from other analogous sources, Archaeology

carefully collects, arranges, and generalises, stimulated by the fond

hope that through such means she will yet gradually recover more and

more of the earlier chronicles and lost annals of the human race, and of

the various individual communities and families of that race.

The objects of antiquarian research embrace events and periods, many of

which are placed within the era of written evidence; but many more are

of a date long anterior to the epoch when man made that greatest of

human discoveries--the discovery, namely, of the power of permanently

recording words, thoughts, and acts, in symbolical and alphabetic

writing. To some minds it has seemed almost chimerical for the

archaeologist to expect to regain to any extent a knowledge of the

conditions and circumstances of man, and of the different nations of

men, before human cunning had learned to collect and inscribe them on

stone or brass, or had fashioned them into written or traditional

records capable of being safely floated down the stream of time. But the

modern history of Archaeology, as well as the analogies of other allied

pursuits, are totally against any such hopeless views.

Almost within the lifetime of some who are still amongst us, there has

sprung up and been cultivated--and cultivated most successfully too--a

science which has no written documents or legible inscriptions to guide

it on its path, and whose researches are far more ancient in their

object than the researches of Archaeology. Its subject is an antiquity

greatly older than human antiquity. It deals with the state of the earth

and of the inhabitants of the earth in times immeasurably beyond the

earliest times studied by the antiquary. In the course of its

investigations it has recovered many strange stories and marvellous

chronicles of the world and of its living occupants--long, long ages

before human antiquity even began. But if Geology has thus successfully

restored to us long and important chapters in the pre-Adamite annals of

the world's history, need Archaeology despair of yet deciphering and

reading--infinitely more clearly than it has yet done--that far later

episode in the drama of the past which opens with the appearance of man

as a denizen of earth. The modes of investigating these two allied and

almost continuous sciences--Geology and Archaeology--are the same in

principle, however much the two sciences themselves may differ in

detail. And if Geology, in its efforts to regain the records of the past

state of animal and vegetable life upon the surface of the earth, has

attractions which bind the votaries of it to its ardent study, surely

Archaeology has equal, if not stronger claims to urge in its own behoof

and favour. To the human mind the study of those relics by which the

archaeologist tries to recover and reconstruct the history of the past

races and nations of man, should naturally form as engrossing a topic as

the study of those relics by which the geologist tries to regain the

history of the past races and families of the _fauna_ and _flora_ of the

ancient world. Surely, as a mere matter of scientific pursuit, the

ancient or fossil states of man should--for man himself--have

attractions as great, at least, as the ancient or fossil states of

plants and animals; and the old Celt, or Pict, or Saxon, be as

interesting a study as the old Lepidodendron or Ichthyosaurus.

Formerly, the pursuit of Archaeology was not unfrequently regarded as a

kind of romantic dilettanteism, as a collecting together of meaningless

antique relics and oddities, as a greedy hoarding and storing up of

rubbish and frivolities that were fit only for an old curiosity shop,

and that were valued merely because they were old;--while the essays and

writings of the antiquary were looked down upon as disquisitions upon

very profitless conjectures, and very solemn trivialities. Perhaps the

objects and method in which antiquarian studies were formerly pursued

afforded only too much ground for such accusations. But all this is now,

in a great measure, entirely changed. Archaeology, as tempered and

directed by the philosophic spirit, and quickened with the life and

energy of the nineteenth century, is a very different pursuit from the

Archaeology of our forefathers, and has as little relation to their

antiquarianism as modern Chemistry and modern Astronomy have to their

former prototypes--Alchemy and Astrology. In proof of this, I may

confidently appeal to the good work which Archaeology has done, and the

great advances which it has struck out in different directions within

the last fifty years. Within this brief period it has made discoveries,

perhaps in themselves of as momentous and marvellous a character as

those of which any other modern science can boast. Let me cite two or

three instances in illustration of this remark.

Dating, then, from the commencement of the present century, Archaeology

has--amidst its other work--rediscovered, through the interpretation of

the Rosetta-stone, the long-lost hieroglyphic language of Egypt, and has

thus found a key by which it has begun--but only as yet begun--to unlock

the rich treasure-stores of ancient knowledge which have for ages lain

concealed among the monuments and records scattered along the valley of

the Nile. It has copied, by the aid of the telescope, the trilingual

arrow-headed inscriptions written 300 feet high upon the face of the

rocks of Behistun; and though the alphabets and the languages in which

these long inscriptions were "graven with a pen of iron and lead upon

the rocks for ever," had been long dead and unknown, yet, by a kind of

philological divination, Archaeology has exorcised and resuscitated both;

and from these dumb stones, and from the analogous inscriptions of Van,

Elwend, Persepolis, etc., it has evoked official gazettes and royal

contemporaneous annals of the deeds and dominions of Darius, Xerxes, and

other Persian kings. By a similar almost talismanic power and process,

it has forced the engraved cylinders, bricks, and obelisks of the old

cities of Chaldea and Babylonia--as those of Wurka, Niffer, Muqueyer,

etc.--to repeat over again to this present generation of men the names

of the ancient founders of their public buildings, and the wars and

exploits of their ancient monarchs. It has searched among the shapeless

mounds on the banks of the Tigris, and after removing the shroud of

earth and rubbish under which "Nineveh the Great" had there lain

entombed for ages, it has brought back once more to light the riches of

the architecture and sculptures of the palaces of that renowned city,

and shown the advanced knowledge of Assyria--some thirty long centuries

ago--in mechanics and engineering, in working and inlaying with metals,

in the construction of the optical lens, in the manufactory of pottery

and glass, and in most other matters of material civilisation. It has

lately, by these and other discoveries in the East, confirmed in many

interesting points, and confuted in none, the truth of the Biblical

records. It has found, for instance, every city in Palestine and the

neighbouring kingdoms whose special and precise doom was pronounced by

the sure word of Prophecy, showing the exact state foretold of them

twenty or thirty centuries ago,--as Askelon tenantless, the site of

ancient Gaza "bald," old Tyre "scraped" up, and Samaria with its

foundations exposed, and its "stones poured down in heaps" into the

valley below. It has further, within the last few years, stolen into the

deserts of the Hauran, through the old vigilant guard formed around that

region by the Bedouin Arabs, and there--(as if in startling

contradiction to the dead and buried cities of Syria, etc.)--it has--as

was equally predicted--discovered the numerous cyclopic cities of

Bashan standing perfect and entire, yet "desolate and without any to

dwell therein,"--cities wrapped, as it were, in a state of mortal

trance, and patiently awaiting the prophesied period of their future

revival and rehabitation; some of them of great size, as Um-el-Jemal

(probably the Beth-gamul of Scripture), a city covering as large a space

as Jerusalem, with its high and massive basaltic town walls, its

squares, its public buildings, its paved streets, and its houses with

their rooms, stairs, revolving and frequently sculptured stone-doors,

all nearly as complete and unbroken, as if its old inhabitants had only

deserted it yesterday. Again, from another and more distant part of the

East,--from the plains of India,--Archaeology has recently brought to

Europe, and at an English press printed for the first time, upwards of

1000 of the sacred hymns of the Rig-Veda, the most ancient literary work

of the Aryan or Indo-European race of mankind; for, according to the

calm judgment of our ripest Sanskrit scholars, these hymns were composed

before Homer sung of the wrath of Achilles; and they are further

remarkable, on this account, that they seem to have been transmitted

down for upwards of 3000 years by oral tradition alone--the Brahmin

priests up to the present day still spending--as Caesar tells us the old

Druidical priests of Gaul spent--twelve, twenty, or more years of their

lives, in learning by heart these sacred lays and themes, and then

teaching them in turn to their pupils and successors.

The notices of antiquarian progress in modern times, that I have

hitherto alluded to, refer to other continents than our own. But since

the commencement of the present century Archaeology has been equally

active in Europe. It has, by its recent devoted study of the whole

works of art belonging to Greece, shown that in many respects a livelier

and more familiar knowledge of the ancient inhabitants of that classic

land is to be derived from the contemplation of their remaining statues,

sculptures, gems, medals, coins, etc., than by any amount of mere

school-grinding at Greek words and Greek quantities. It has recovered at

the same time some interesting objects connected with ancient Grecian

history; having, for example, during the occupation of Constantinople in

1854 by the armies of England and France, laid bare to its base and

carefully copied the inscription, engraved some twenty-three centuries

ago, upon the brazen stand of the famous tripod which was dedicated by

the confederate Greeks to Apollo at Delphi, after the defeat of the

Persian host at Platea,--an inscription that Herodotus himself speaks

of, and by which, indeed, the Father of History seems to have

authenticated his own battle-roll of the Greek combatants. Archaeology

has busied itself also, particularly of late years, in disinterring the

ruins of numerous old Roman villas, towns, and cities in Italy, in

France, in Britain, and in the other western colonies of Home; and by

this measure it has gained for us a clearer and nearer insight into

every-day Roman life and habits, than all the wealth of classic

literature supplies us with. Though perfectly acquainted with the

Etruscan alphabet, it has hitherto utterly failed to read a single line

of the numerous inscriptions found in Etruria, but yet among the

unwritten records and relics of the towns and tombs of that ancient

kingdom, it has recovered a wonderfully complete knowledge of the

manners, and habits, and faith, of a great and prosperous nation,

which--located in the central districts of Italy--was already far

advanced in civilisation and refinement long before that epoch when

Romulus is fabled to have drawn around the Palatine the first boundary

line of the infant city which was destined to become the mistress of the

world. Latterly, among all the western and northern countries of Europe,

in Germany, in Scandinavia, in Denmark, in France, and in the British

Islands, Archaeology has made many careful and valuable collections of

the numerous and diversified implements, weapons, etc., of the

aboriginal inhabitants of these parts, and traced by them the

stratifications, as it were, of progress and civilisation, by which our

primaeval ancestors successively passed upwards through the varying eras

and stages of advancement, from their first struggles in the battle of

life with tools of stone, and flint, and bone alone, till they

discovered and applied the use of metals in the arts alike of peace and

war; from those distant ages in which, dressed in the skins of animals,

they wore ornaments made of sea-shells and jet, till the times when they

learned to plait and weave dresses of hair, wool, and other fibres, and

adorned their chiefs with torcs and armlets of bronze, silver, and gold.

Archaeology also has sought out and studied the strongholds and forts,

the land and lake habitations of these, our primaeval Celtic and Teutonic

forefathers:--and has discovered among their ruins many interesting

specimens of the implements they used, the dresses that they wore, the

houses they inhabited, and the very food they fed upon. It has descended

also into their sepulchres and tombs, and there--among the mysterious

contents of their graves and cinerary urns--it has found revealed many

other wondrous proofs of their habits and condition during this life, as

well as of their creeds and faith in regard to a future state of

existence.

By the aid of that new and most powerful ally, Comparative Philology,

Archaeology has lately made other great advances. By proofs exactly of

the same linguistic kind as those by which the modern Spanish, French,

and other Latin dialects can be shown to have all radiated from Rome as

their centre, the old traditions of the eastern origin of all the chief

nations of Europe have been proved to be fundamentally true; for by

evidence so "irrefragable" (to use the expression of the Taylorian

professor of modern languages at Oxford), that "not an English jury

could now-a-days reject it," Philological Archaeology has shown that of

the three great families of mankind--the Semitic, the Turanian, and the

Aryan--this last, the Aryan, Japhetic, or Indo-European race, had its

chief home about the centre of Western Asia;--that betimes there issued

thence from its paternal hearths, and wended their way southward, human

swarms that formed the nations of Persia and Hindustan;--that at distant

and different, and in some cases earlier periods, there hived off from

the same parental stock other waves of population, which wandered

westward, and formed successively the European nations of the Celts, the

Teutons, the Italians, the Greeks, and the Sclaves;--and that while each

exodus of this western emigration, which followed in the wake of its

fellow, drove its earliest predecessor before it in a general direction

further and further towards the setting sun, at the same time some

aboriginal, and probably Turanian races, which previously inhabited

portions of Europe, were gradually pushed and pressed aside and upwards,

by the more powerful and encroaching Aryans, into districts either so

sterile or so mountainous and strong, that it was too worthless or too

difficult to follow them further--their remnants being represented at

the present day by the Laps, the Basques, and the Esths. Philological

Archaeology has further demonstrated that the vast populations which now

stretch from the mouth of the Ganges to the Pentland Firth,--sprung, as

they are, with a few exceptions only, from the same primitive Aryan

stock,--all use words which, though phonetically changed, are radically

identical for many matters, as for the nearest relationships of family

life, for the naming of domestic animals, and other common objects. Some

of these archaic words indicate, by their hoary antiquity, the original

pastoral employment and character of those that formed the parental

stock in our old original Asiatic home; the special term, for example

(the "pasu" of the old Sanskrit or Zend), which signified "private"

property among the Aryans, and which we now use under the English

modifications, "peculiar" and "pecuniary"--primarily meaning

"flocks;"[9] the Sanskrit word for Protector, and ultimately for the

king himself, "go-pa," being the old word for cowherd, and consecutively

for chief herdsman; while the endearing name of "daughter" (the duhitar

of the Sanskrit, the [Greek: thygater] of the Greek), as applied in the

leading Indo-European languages to the female children of our

households, is derived from a verb which shows the original

signification of the appellation to have been the "milker" of the cows.

At the same time the most ancient mythologies and superstitions, and

apparently even the legends and traditions of the various and

diversified Indo-European races, appear also, the more they are

examined, to betray more and more of a common parentage. Briefly, and in

truth, then, Philological Archaeology proves that the Saxon and the

Persian, the Scandinavian and the Greek, the Icelander and the Italian,

the fair-skinned Scottish Highlander, and his late foe, the swarthy

Bengalee, are all distant, very distant, cousins, whose ancestors were

brothers that parted company with each other long, long ages ago, on the

plains of Iran. That the ancestors of these different races originally

lived together on these Asiatic plains "within the same fences, and

separate from the ancestors of the Semitic and Turanian races," is (to

quote the words of Max Mueller), "a fact as firmly established as that

the Normans of William the Conqueror were the Northmen of Scandinavia."

Lastly, to close this too long, and yet too rapid and imperfect sketch

of some of the work performed by modern inductive Archaeology, let me

merely here add,--for the matter is too important to omit,--that,

principally since the commencement of this century, Archaeology has

sedulously sat down among the old and forbidding stores of musty, and

often nearly illegible manuscripts, charters, cartularies, records,

letters, and other written documents, that have been accumulating for

hundreds of years in the public and private collections of Europe, and

has most patiently and laboriously culled from them annals and facts

having the most direct and momentous bearing upon the acts and thoughts

of our mediaeval forefathers, and upon the events and persons of these

mediaeval times. By means of this last type of work, the researches of

the antiquary have to a wonderful degree both purified and extended the

history of this and of the other kingdoms of Europe. These researches

have further, and in an especial manner, thrown a new flood of light

upon the inner and domestic life of our ancestors, and particularly upon

the conditions of the middle and lower grades of society in former

times,--objects ever of primary moment to the researches of Archaeology

in its services, as the workman and the pioneer of history. For, truly,

human history, as it has been hitherto usually composed, has been too

often written as if human chronicles ought to detail only the deeds of

camps and courts--as if the number of men murdered on particular

battle-fields, and the intrigues and treasons perpetrated in royal and

lordly antechambers, were the sum total of actual knowledge which it was

of any moment to transmit from one generation of men to another. In

gathering, however, from the records of the past his materials for the

true philosophy of history, the archaeologist finds--and is now teaching

the public to find--as great an attraction in studying the arts of peace

as in studying the arts of war; for in his eyes the life, and thoughts,

and faith of the merchant, and craftsman, and churl, are as important as

those of the knight, and nobleman, and prince--with him the peasant is

as grand and as genuine a piece of antiquity as the king.

Small in extent, scant in population, and spare in purse, as Scotland

confessedly is, yet, in the cultivation of Archaeology she has in these

modern times by no means lagged behind the other and greater kingdoms of

Europe. This observation is attested by the rich and valuable Museum of

Scottish antiquities which this Society has gathered together--a Museum

which, exclusively of its large collection of foreign coins, now numbers

above 7000 specimens, for nearly 1000 of which we stand indebted to the

enlightened zeal and patriotic munificence of one Scottish gentleman,

Mr. A. Henry Rhind of Sibster. The same fact is attested also by the

highly valuable character of the systematic works on Scottish Archaeology

which have been published of late years by some of our colleagues, such

as the masterly _Pre-historic Annals of Scotland_, by Professor Daniel

Wilson; the admirable volume on _Scotland in the Middle Ages_, by

Professor Cosmo Innes; and the delightful _Domestic Annals of Scotland_,

by Mr. Robert Chambers. The essays also, and monographs on individual

subjects in Scottish Archaeology, published by Mr. Laing, Lord Neaves,

Mr. Skene, Mr. Stuart, Mr. Robertson, Mr. Fraser, Captain Thomas, Mr.

Burton, Mr. Napier, Mr. M'Kinlay, Mr. M'Lauchlan, Dr. Wise, Dr. J.A.

Smith, Mr. Drummond, etc., all strongly prove the solid and successful

interest which the subject of Scottish Archaeology has in recent times

created in this city. The recent excellent town and county histories

published by Dr. Peter Chalmers, Messrs. Irving, Jeffrey, Jervise,

Pratt, Black, Miller, etc., afford evidences to the same effect. Nor can

I forget in such an enumeration the two complete _Statistical Accounts

of Scotland_. But if I were asked to name any one circumstance, as

proving more than another the attention lately awakened among our

countrymen by antiquarian inquiries, I would point, with true patriotic

pride, to the numerous olden manuscript chronicles of Scotland, of

Scottish towns, and Scottish monasteries, institutions, families, and

persons, which have been printed within the last forty years--almost all

of them having been presented as free and spontaneous contributions to

Scottish Archaeology and History by the members of the Bannatyne, the

Abbotsford, the Maitland, and the Spalding Clubs; and the whole now

forming a goodly series of works extending to not less than three

hundred printed quarto volumes.

But let us not cheat and cozen ourselves into idleness and apathy by

reflecting and rejoicing over what has been done. For, after all, the

truth is, that Scottish Archaeology is still so much in its infancy, that

it is only now beginning to guess its powers, and feel its deficiencies.

It has still no end of lessons to learn, and perhaps some to unlearn,

before it can manage to extract the true metal of knowledge from the ore

and dross of exaggeration in which many of its inquiries have become

enveloped. At this present hour we virtually know far less of the

Archaeology and history of Scotland ten or fifteen centuries ago than we

know of the Archaeology and history of Etruria, Egypt, or Assyria,

twenty-five or thirty centuries ago.

In order to obtain the light which is required to clear away the dark

and heavy mists which thus obscure the early Archaeology of Scotland, how

should we proceed? In the pursuits and investigations of Archaeology, as

of other departments of science, there has never yet been, and never

will be discovered, any direct railway or royal road to the knowledge

which we are anxious to gain, but which we are inevitably doomed to wait

for and to work for. The different branches of science are Gordian

knots, the threads of which we can only hope to unwind and evolve by

cautious assiduity, and slow, patient industry. Their secrets cannot be

summarily cut open and exposed by the sword of any son of Philip. But,

in our daydreams, it is not unpleasant sometimes to imagine the

possibility of such a feat. It was, as we all know, very generally

believed, in distant antiquarian times, that occasionally dead men could

be induced to rise, and impart all sorts of otherwise unattainable

information to the living. This creed, however, has not been limited to

those ancient times, for, in our own days, many sane persons still

profess to believe in the possibility of summoning the spirits of the

departed from the other world back to this sublunary sphere. When they

do so, they have always hitherto, as far as I have heard, encouraged

these spirits to perform such silly juggling tricks, or requested them

to answer such trivial and frivolous questions, as would seem to my

humble apprehension to be almost insulting to the grim dignity and

solemn character of any respectable and intelligent ghost. If, like Owen

Glendower, or Mr. Home, I had the power to "call spirits from the vasty

deep," and if the spirits answered the call, I--being a practical

man--would fain make a practical use of their presence. Methinks I

should feel grossly tempted, for example, to ask such of them as had the

necessary foreknowledge, to rap out for me, in the first instance, the

exact state of the English funds, or of the London stock and share-list,

a week or a month hence; for such early information would, I opine--if

the spirits were true spirits--be rather an expeditious and easy mode of

filling my coffers, or the coffers of any man who had the good sense of

plying these spiritual intelligences with one or two simple and useful

questions. If, however, the spirits refused to answer such golden

interrogatories as involving matters too mercenary and not sufficiently

ghostly in their character, then I certainly should next ask them--and I

would of course select very ancient spirits for the purpose--hosts of

questions regarding the state of society, religion, the arts, etc., at

the time when they themselves were living denizens of this earth.

Suppose, for a moment, that our Secretaries, on summoning the next

meeting of this Society, had the power of announcing in their billets

that, by "some feat of magic mystery," a very select and intelligent

deputation of ancient Britons and Caledonians, Picts, Celts, and Scots,

and perhaps of Scottish Turanians, were to be present in our

Museum--(certainly the most appropriate room in the kingdom for such a

reunion)--for a short sederunt, somewhere between twilight and

cock-crowing, to answer any questions which the Fellows might choose to

ply them with, what an excitement would such an announcement create! How

eagerly would some of our Fellows look forward to the results of one or

two such "Hours with the Mystics." And what a battery of quick questions

would be levelled at the members of this deputation on all the endless

problems involved in Scottish Archaeology. I think we may readily, and

yet pretty certainly, conjecture a few of the questions, on our earlier

antiquities alone, that would be put by various members that I might

name, as:--

What is the signification of the so-called "crescent" and "spectacle"

ornaments, and of the other unique symbols that are so common upon the

150 and odd ancient Sculptured Stones scattered over the north-eastern

districts of Scotland?

What is the true reading of the old enigmatic inscriptions upon the

Newton and St. Vigean's stones, and of the Oghams on the stones of

Logie, Bressay, Golspie, etc.?

Had Solinus Polyhistor, in the fourth century, any ground for stating

that an ancient Ulyssean altar, written with Greek letters, existed in

the recesses of Caledonia?

Who were Vetta, Victus, Memor, Loinedinus, Liberalis, Florentius,

Mavorius, etc., whose names are recorded on the Romano-British monuments

at Kirkliston, Yarrow, Kirkmadrine, etc., and what is the date of these

monuments?

By what people was constructed the Devil's Dyke, which runs above fifty

miles in length from Loch Ryan into Nithsdale?

When, and for what purpose, was the Catrail dug?

Was it on the line of the Catrail, or of the Roman wall between the

Forth and Clyde, or on what other ground, that there was fought the

great battle or siege of Cattraeth or Kaltraez, which Aneurin sings of

in his _Gododin_, and where, among the ranks of the British combatants,

were "three hundred and sixty-three chieftains wearing the golden torcs"

(some specimens, of which might yet perhaps be dug up on the

battle-field by our Museum Committee, seeing three only of these chiefs

escaped alive); and how was the "bewitching mead" brewed, that Aneurin

tells us was far too freely partaken of by his British countrymen before

and during this fierce struggle with the Saxon foe?

Is the poet Aneurin the same person as our earliest native prose

historian Gildas, the two appellations being relatively the Cymric and

Saxon names of the same individual? Or were they not two of the sons or

descendants of Caw of Cwm Cawlwyd, that North British chief whose

miraculous interview with St. Cadoc near Bannawc (Stirlingshire?) is

described in the life of that Welsh saint?

Of what family and rank was the poet--Merddin Wyllt--or "Merlin the

Wild," who, wearing the chieftain's golden torc, fought at the battle of

Arderydd, about A.D. 573, against Rhydderch Hael, that king of Alcluith

or Dumbarton, who was the friend of St. Columba, and "the champion of

the (Christian) faith," as Merlin himself styles him? And when that

victory was apparently the direct means of establishing this Christian

king upon the throne of Strathclyde, and the indirect means which led to

the recall of St. Kentigern from St. Asaph's to Glasgow, how is it that

the Welsh Triads talk of it enigmatically as a battle for a lark's nest?

If Ossian is not a myth, when and where did he live and sing? Was he not

an Irish Gael? And could any member of the deputation give us any

accurate information about our old nursery friend Fingal or Fin Mac

Coul? Was he really, after all, not greater, or larger, or any other

than simply a successful and reforming general in the army of King

Cormac of Tara, and the son-in-law of that monarch of Ireland?

From what part of Pictland did King Cormac obtain, in the third century,

the skilled mill-wright, Mac Lamha, to build for him that first

water-mill which he erected in Ireland, on one of the streams of Tara?

And is it true, as some genealogists in this earthly world believe, that

the lineal descendants of this Scottish or Pictish mill-wright are still

millers on the reputed site of this original Irish water-mill?

The apostate Picts (_Picti apostati_) who along with the Scots are

spoken of by St. Patrick in his famous letter against Coroticus, as

having bought for slaves some of the Christian converts kidnapped and

carried off by that chief from Ireland, were they inhabitants of

Galloway, or of our more northern districts? And was the Irish sea not

very frequently a "middle passage" in these early days, across which St.

Patrick himself and many others were carried from their native homes and

sold into slavery?

Was it a Pictish or Scottish, a British or a Roman architect that built

"Julius' howff," at Stenhouse (_Stone-house_) on the Carron, and what

was its use and object?

Were our numerous "weems," or underground houses, really used as human

abodes, and were they actually so very dark, that when one of the

inmates ventured on a joke, he was obliged--as suggested by "Elia"--to

handle his neighbour's cheek to feel if there was any resulting smile

playing upon it?

When, and by whom were reared the Titanic stone-works on the White

Caterthun, and the formidable stone and earth forts and walls on the

Brown Caterthun, on Dunsinane, on Barra, on the Barmekyn of Echt, on

Dunnichen, on Dunpender, and on the tops of hundreds of other hills in

Scotland?

How, and when, were our Vitrified Forts built? Was the vitrification of

the walls accidental, or was it not rather intentional, as most of us

now believe? In particular, who first constructed, and who last occupied

the remarkable Vitrified Forts of Finhaven in Angus, and of the hill of

Noath in Strathbogie? Was not the Vitrified Fort of Craig-Phadric, near

Inverness, the residence of King Brude, the son of Meilochon, in the

sixth century; and if so, is it true, as stated in the Irish Life of St.

Columba, that its gates were provided with iron locks?

When, by whom, and for what object, were the moats of Urr, Hawick,

Lincluden, Biggar, and our other great circular earth mounds of the same

kind, constructed? Were they used for judicial and legal purposes, like

the old Things of Scandinavia; and as the Tinwald Mount in the island of

Man is used to this day? And were not some of them military or

sepulchral works?

Who fashioned the terraces at Newlands in Tweeddale; and what was the

origin of the many hillside terraces scattered over the country?

What is the age of the rock-caves of Ancrum, Hawthornden, etc., and were

they primarily used as human habitations?

The sea-cave at Aldham on the Firth of Forth--when opened in 1831, with

its paved floor strewed with charred wood, animal bones, limpet-shells,

and apparently with a rock-altar at its mouth, having its top marked

with fire, ashes adhering to its side, and two infants' skeletons lying

at its base--was it a human habitation, or a Pagan temple?

What races sleep in the chambered barrows and cairns of Clava, Yarrows,

Broigar, and in the many other similar old Scottish cities and houses of

the dead?

By whom and for what purpose or purposes were the megalithic circles at

Stennis, Callernish, Leys, Achnaclach, Crichie, Kennethmont, Midmar,

Dyce, Kirkmichael, Deer, Kirkbean, Lochrutton, Torhouse, etc., etc.,

reared?

What were the leading peculiarities in the religious creed, faith, and

festivals of Broichan and the other Caledonian or Pictish Magi before

the introduction of Christianity?

When Coifi, the pagan high-priest of Edwin, the king of Northumbria and

the Lothians, was converted to Christianity by Paulinus, in A.D. 627, he

destroyed, according to Bede, the heathen idols, and set fire to the

heathen temples and altars; but what was the structure of the pagan

temples here in these days, that he could burn them,--while at the same

time they were so uninclosed, that men on horseback could ride into

them, as Coifi himself did after he had thrown in the desecrating spear?

Was not our city named after this Northumbrian Bretwalda,

"Edwin's-burgh?" Or was the Eiddyn of which Aneurin speaks before the

time of Edwin, and the Dinas Eiddyn that was one of the chief seats of

Llewddyn Lueddog (Lew or Loth), the grandfather of St. Kentigern or

Mungo of Glasgow, really our own Dun Edin? Or if the Welsh term "Dinas"

does not necessarily imply the high or elevated position of the place,

was it Caer Eden (Cariden, or Blackness), at the eastern end of the

Roman Wall, on the banks of the Forth?

Did our venerable castle rock obtain the Welsh name of Din or Dun

Monaidh, from its being "the fortress of the hill," and was its other

Cymric appellation Agnedh, connected with its ever having been given as

a marriage-portion (Agwedh)? Or did its old name of Maiden Castle, or

Castrum Puellarum, not rather originate in its olden use as a female

prison, or as a school, or a nunnery?

And is it true, as asserted by Conchubhranus, that the Irish lady Saint,

Darerca or Monnine, founded, late in the fifth century, seven churches

(or nunneries?) in Scotland, on the hills of Dun Edin, Dumbarton,

Stirling, Dunpelder, and Dundevenal, at Lanfortin near Dundee, and at

Chilnacase in Galloway?

When, and by whom, were the Round Towers of Abernethy, Brechin, and

Eglishay built? Were there not in Scotland or its islands other such

"_turres rotundae mira arte constructae_," to borrow the phrase of

Hector Boece regarding the Brechin tower?

If St. Patrick was, as some of his earliest biographers aver, a

Strathclyde Briton, born about A.D. 387 at Nempthur (Nemphlar, on the

Clyde?) and his father Calphurnius was, as St. Patrick himself states in

his Confession, a deacon, and his grandfather Potitus a priest, then he

belonged to a family two generations of which were already

office-bearers in Scotland in the Christian Church;--but were there

many, or any such families in Scotland before St. Ninian built his stone

church at Whithern about A.D. 397, or St. Palladius, the missionary of

Pope Celestine, died about A.D. 431, in the Mearns? And was it a mere

rhetorical flourish, or was there some foundation for the strong and

distinct averment of the Latin father Tertullian, that, when he wrote,

about the time of the invasion of Scotland by Severus (_circa_ A.D.

210), there were places in Britain beyond the limits of the Roman sway

already subject to Christ?

When Dion Cassius describes this invasion of Scotland by Severus, and

the Roman Emperor's loss of 50,000 men in the campaign, does he not

indulge in "travellers' tales," when he further avers that our

Caledonian ancestors were such votaries of hydropathy that they could

stand in their marshes immersed up to the neck in water for live-long

days, and had a kind of prepared homoeopathic food, the eating of a

piece of which, the size of a bean, entirely prevented all hunger and

thirst?

Caesar tells us that dying the skin blue with woad was a practice common

among our British ancestors some 1900 years ago;--are Claudian and

Herodian equally correct in describing the very name of Picts as being

derived from a system of painting or tattooing the skin, that was in

their time as fashionable among some of our Scottish forefathers, as it

is in our time in New Zealand, and among the Polynesians?

According to Caesar, the Britons wore a moustache on the upper lip, but

shaved the rest of the beard; and the sole stone--fortunately a fragment

of ancient sculpture--which has been saved from the ruins of the old

capital of the Picts at Forteviot, shows a similar practice among them.

But what did they shave with? Were their razors of bronze, or iron, or

steel? And where, and by whom, were they manufactured?

Was the state of civilisation and of the arts among the Caledonians,

when Agricola invaded them, about A.D. 80 or 81, as backward as some

authorities have imagined, seeing that they were already so skilled in,

for example, the metallurgic arts, as to be able to construct, for the

purposes of war,--chariots, and consequently chariot-wheels, long

swords, darts, targets, etc.?

As the swords of the Caledonians in the first century were, according to

Tacitus, long, large, and blunt at the point, and hence in all

probability made of iron, whence came the sharp-pointed leaf-shaped

bronze swords so often found in Scotland, and what is the place and date

of their manufacture? Were they earlier? And what is the real origin of

the large accumulation of spears and other instruments of bronze, some

whole, and others twisted, as if half-melted with heat, which, with

human bones, deer and elk-horns, were dredged up from Duddingston Loch

about eighty years ago, and constituted, it may be said, the foundation

of our Museum? Was there an ancient bronze-smith shop in the

neighbourhood; or were these not rather the relics of a burned crannoge

that had formerly existed in this lake, within two miles of the future

metropolis of Scotland?

Could the deputation inform us where we might find, buried and concealed

in our muirs or mosses, and obtain for our Museum some interesting

antiquarian objects which we sadly covet--such as a specimen or two, for

instance, of those Caledonian spears described by Dion, that had a

brazen apple, sounding when struck, attached to their lower extremity?

or one of those statues of Mercury that, Caesar says, were common among

the Western Druids? or one of the _covini_ mentioned by Tacitus--(for we

are anxious to know if its wheels were of iron or bronze; how these

wheels made, as Caesar tells us the wheels of the British war-chariots

made, a loud noise in running; and whether or not they had, as some

authorities maintain, scythes or long swords affixed to their axles)? or

where we might dig up another specimen of such ancient and engraved

silver armour as was some years ago discovered at Norrie's Law, in Fife,

and unfortunately melted down by the jeweller at Cupar? or could any of

the deputation refer us to any spot where we might have a good chance of

finding a concealed example of such glass goblets as were, according to

Adamnan, to be met with in the royal palace of Brude, king of the Picts,

when St. Columba visited him, in A.D. 563, in his royal fort and hall

(_munitio, aula regalis_) on the banks of the Ness?

Whence came King "Cruithne," with his seven sons, and the Picts? Were

they of Gothic descent and tongue, as Mr. Jonathan Oldbuck maintained in

rather a notorious dispute in the parlour at Monkbarns? or were they

"genuine Celtic," as Sir Arthur Wardour argued so stoutly on the same

memorable occasion?

Were the first Irish or Dalriadic Gaeidhil or Scots who took possession

of Argyll (_i.e._, Airer-Gaeidheal, or the district of the Gaeidhel),

and who subsequently gave the name of Scot-land to the whole kingdom,

the band of emigrants that crossed from Antrim about A.D. 506 under the

leadership of Fergus and the other sons of Erc; or, as the name of

"Scoti" recurs more than once in the old sparse notices of the tribes of

the kingdom before this date, had not an antecedent colony, under

Cairbre Riada, as stated by Bede, already passed over and settled in

Cantyre a century or two before?

Our Reformed British Parliament is still so archaeological as to listen,

many times each session, to Her Majesty, or Her Majesty's Commissioners,

assenting to their bills, by pronouncing a sentence of old and obsolete

Norman French--a memorial in its way of the Norman Conquest; and our

State customs are so archaeological that, when Her Majesty, and a long

line of her illustrious predecessors, have been crowned in Westminster

Abbey, the old Scottish coronation-stone, carried off in A.D. 1296 by

Edward I. from Scone, and which had been previously used for centuries

as the coronation-stone of the Scotic, and perhaps of the Irish, or even

the Milesian race of kings, has been placed under their

coronation-chair--playing still its own archaic part in this gorgeous

state drama. But is this Scone or Westminster coronation-stone really

and truly--as it is reputed to be by some Scottish historians--the

famous _Lia Fail_ of the kings of Ireland, that various old Irish

writings describe as formerly standing on the Hill of Tara, near the

Mound of the Hostages? Or does not the _Lia Fail_--"the stone that

roared under the feet of each king that took possession of the throne of

Ireland"--remain still on Tara--(though latterly degraded to the office

of a grave-stone)--as is suggested by the distinguished author of the

History and Antiquities of Tara Hill? If any of our deputies from

ghostdom formerly belonged to the court of Fergus MacErc, or originally

sailed across with him in his fleet of _currachs_, perhaps they will be

so good as tell us if in reality the royal or any other of the

accompanying skin-canoes was ballasted then or subsequently with a

sacred stone from Ireland, for the coronation of our first Dalriadic

king; and especially would we wish it explained to us how such a

precious monument as the _Lia Fail_ of Tara was or could be smuggled

away by such a small tribe as the Dalriadic Scots at first were? Perhaps

it would be right and civil to tell the deputation at once, that the

truth is we are anxious to decide the knotty question as to whether the

opinions of Edward I. or of Dr. Petrie are the more correct in regard to

this "Stone of Fate?" Or if King Edward was right politically, is Dr.

Petrie right archaeologically, in his views on this subject? In short,

does the _Lia Fail_ stand at the present day--as is generally

believed--in the vicinity of the Royal Halls of Westminster, or in the

vicinity of the Royal Halls of Tara?

What ancient people, destitute apparently of metal tools and of any

knowledge of mortar, built the gigantic burgs or duns of Mousa, Hoxay,

Glenelg, Carloway, Bragar, Kildonan, Farr, Rogart, Olrick, etc., with

galleries and chambers in the thickness of their huge uncemented walls?

Is it true, as the Irish bardic writers allege, that some of the race of

the Firbolgs escaped, after the battle at one of the Moyturas to the

Western Islands and shores of Scotland, and that thence, after several

centuries, they were expelled again by the Picts, after the commencement

of the Christian era, and subsequently returned to the coast of Galway,

and built, or rebuilt, there and then, the great analogous burgs of Dun

AEngus, Dun Conchobhair, etc., in the Irish isles of Aran?[10]

What is the signification of those mysterious circles formed of

diminishing concentric rings which are found engraved, sometimes on

rocks outside an old aboriginal village or camp, as at Rowtin Lynn and

Old Bewick; sometimes on the walls of underground chambers, as in the

Holm of Papa Westray, and in the island of Eday; sometimes on the walls

of a chambered tumulus, as at Pickaquoy in Orkney; or on the interior of

the lid of a kistvaen, as at Craigie 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?

When the first wave of Celtic emigrants arrived in Scotland, did they

not find a Turanian or Hamitic race already inhabiting it, and were

those Scottish streams, lakes, etc., which bear, or have borne, in their

composition, the Euskarian word _Ura_ (water)--as the rivers Urr, Orr,

and Ury, lochs Ur, Urr, and Orr, Urr-quhart, Cath-Ures, Or-well, Or-rea,

etc., named by these Turanian aborigines?

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[11] 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,"[12] 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 (according,

at least, to some high philologists), 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?

Or perhaps, passing from more direct interrogatories, we might request

some of the deputation to leave with us a retranslation of that famous

letter preserved by Bede, which Abbot Ceolfrid addressed about A.D. 715

to Nectan III., King of the Picts, and which the venerable monk of

Jarrow tells us was, immediately after its receipt by the Pictish King

and court, carefully interpreted into their own language? or to be so

good as write down a specimen of the Celtic or Pictish songs that

happened to be most popular some twelve or fourteen centuries ago? or

describe to us the limits at different times of the kingdoms of the

Strathclyde Britons and Northumbrians, and of the Picts and Dalriadic

Scots? or fill up the sad gaps in Mr. Innes' map of Scotland in the

tenth century, containing, as it does, the names of one river only, and

some thirteen Scottish church establishments and towns; or tell us where

the "urbs Giudi" and the Pictish "Niduari" of Bede were placed, and why

AEngus the Culdee speaks (about A.D. 800) of Cuilenross, or Culross, as

placed in Strath-h-Irenn in the Comgalls, between Slieve-n-Ochil and the

Sea of Giudan? or identify for us the true sites of the numerous rivers,

tribes, divisions, and towns--or merely perhaps stockaded or rathed

villages--which Ptolemy in the second century enters in his geographical

description of North Britain? or particularise the precise bounds of the

Meatae and Attacotti, and of the two Pictish nations mentioned by

Ammianus Marcellinus, namely, the Dicaledonae and Vecturiones? or trace

out for us the course of Agricola's campaigns in Scotland, especially

marking the exact site of the great victory of the Mons Grampius, and

thus deciding at once and for ever whether the two enormous cairns

placed above the moor of Ardoch cover the remains of the 10,000 slain;

or whether the battle was fought at Dealgin Ross, or at Findochs, or at

Inverpeffery, or at Urie Hill in the Mearns, or at Mormond in Buchan, or

at the "Kaim of Kinprunes?" which last locality, however, was, it must

be confessed, rather summarily and decisively put out of Court some time

ago by the strong personal evidence of Edie Ochiltree.

* * * * *

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 (the highest living authority on

such a subject), 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

(including some early Irish Churches, with stone roofs and Egyptian

doors, that still stand nearly entire in the seclusion of our Western

Islands), 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:--

I. Our ancient Hill-forts of Stone and Earth.

II. Our old cyclopic Burgs and Duns.

III. Our primaeval Towns, Villages, and Raths.

IV. Our Weems or Underground Houses.

V. Our Pagan sepulchral Barrows, Cairns, and Cromlechs.

VI. Our Megalithic Circles and Monoliths.

VII. Our early Inscribed Stones; etc.

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 (which we greatly

lack for our Museum)--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 (1) assiduously collecting together

as many instances as possible of each class of our antiquities; (2)

carefully comparing these instances with each other, so as to ascertain

all their resemblances and differences; and (3) 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.

The collection of home-made pottery on the table--glazed with milk--is

the latest contribution to our Museum. It was recently brought up, by

Captain Thomas and Dr. Mitchell, from the parish of Barvas, in the

Lewis. These "craggans," jars, or bowls, and other culinary dishes, are

certainly specimens of the ceramic art in its most primitive

state;--they are as rude as the rudest of our old cinerary urns; and yet

they constitute, in the places in which they were made and used, the

principal cooking, dyeing, and household vessels possessed by some of

our fellow-countrymen in this the nineteenth century.[13] In the

adjoining parish of Uig, Captain Thomas found and described to us, two

years ago, in one of his instructive and practical papers, the small

beehive stone houses in which some of the nomadic inhabitants of the

district still live in summer. Numerous antiquarian remains, and ruins

of similar houses and collections of houses, exist in Ireland, Wales,

Cornwall, Switzerland, and perhaps in other kingdoms; but apparently

they have everywhere been long ago deserted as human habitations, except

in isolated and outlying spots among the Western Islands of Scotland.

The study of human habits in these Hebridean houses, at the present day,

enables us to guess what the analogous human habits probably were,

when, for example, the old Irish city of Fahan--consisting of similar

structures only--was the busy scene of human life and activity in times

long past. These, and other similar facts, besides teaching us the true

road to some forms of archaeological discovery, teach us also one other

important lesson,--namely, that there are in reality two kinds of

antiquity, both of which claim and challenge our attention. One of these

kinds of antiquity consists in the study of the habits and works of our

distant predecessors and forefathers, who lived on this earth, and

perhaps in this segment of it, many ages ago. The other kind of

antiquity consists of the study of those archaic human habits and works

which may, in some corners of the world, be found still prevailing among

our fellow-men--or even among our own fellow-countrymen--down to the

present hour, in despite of all the blessings of human advancement, and

the progress of human knowledge. By one kind of antiquity we trace the

slow march and revolutions of centuries; by the other we trace the still

slower march and revolutions of civilisation, in countries and kingdoms

where the glittering theories of the politician might have led us to

expect a different and a happier state of matters.

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 (like fairy and goblin forms vanishing before the

break of day) 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,

"[Greek: hydor]" 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. (1), researches beneath the surface of the earth; and

(2), 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 L50 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 (the foundations of their old circular

houses) 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 (Wroxeter), where already many curious discoveries have

rewarded the quiet investigations that are being carried on;--and

Borcovicus in Northumberland (a half-day's journey from Edinburgh), 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;[14] and

various copies of the list of the Pictish kings.

When we come down beyond the eleventh and twelfth centuries, our written

memorials rapidly increase in quantity and extent. I have already

alluded to the fact that three hundred quarto volumes--nearly altogether

drawn from unpublished manuscripts--have been printed by the Scottish

clubs within the last forty years. Mr. Robertson informs me that in the

General Register House alone (and independently of other and private

collections), there is material for at least a hundred volumes more; and

the English Record Office contains, as is well known, many unedited

documents referring to the building of various Scottish castles by

Edward I., and to other points interesting to Scottish Archaeology and

History. The Welsh antiquaries have obtained from the Government offices

in London various important documents of this description referring to

Wales. Why should the antiquaries of Scotland not imitate them in this

respect?

Modern experience has shown that it is not by any means chimerical to

expect, that we may yet recover, from various quarters, and from quite

unexpected sources, too, writings and documents of much interest and

importance in relation both to British and to Scottish Archaeology. Of

that great fossil city Pompeii, not one hundredth part, it is alleged,

has as yet been fully searched; and, according to Sir Charles Lyell, the

quarters hitherto cleared out are those where there was the least

probability of discovering manuscripts. It would be almost hoping beyond

the possibility of hope to expect that in some of its unexplored

mansions, one of the rich libraries of those ancient Roman times may

turn up, presenting papyri deeply interesting to British antiquaries,

and containing, for example, a transcript of that letter on the habits

and character of the inhabitants of Britain which Cicero himself informs

us that he desired his brother Quintus to write, when, as second in

command, he accompanied Julius Caesar in his first invasion of our

island;--or a copy of that account which Himilico the Carthaginian, had

drawn up of his voyage, some centuries before the Christian era, to the

Tin Islands, and other parts northwards of the Pillars of Hercules;--or

a roll of those Punic Annals which Festus Avienus tells us that he

himself consulted when (probably in the fourth century) he wrote those

lines in his "_Ora Maritima_" in which he gives a description of Great

Britain and Ireland.

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 (_veteres

Pictorum libri_) that still existed in the twelfth century, and in

which, among other matters, was a brief account (once copied by the

Pictish clerk Thana, the son of Dudabrach, for King Ferath, at Meigle)

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 (chained to the stalls and

desks), 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.[15] 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.

Among the great mass of interesting Scottish manuscripts preserved in

our General Register House, there is one dated Arbroath,--April

1320;--perhaps the noblest Scottish document of that era. It is the

official duplicate of a letter of remonstrance addressed to Pope John

XXII. by the Barons, Freeholders, and Community of Scotland, in which

these doughty Scotsmen declare, that so long as a hundred of them remain

alive, they will never submit to the dominion of England. This venerable

record and precious declaration of Scottish independence, written on a

sheet of vellum, and authenticated by the dependant seals of its

patriotic authors, was detected by a deceased Scottish nobleman in a

most precarious situation; for he discovered it ruthlessly stuck into

the fire-place of his charter-room.

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 (ung lictz de veloux viollet a double pante

passemente dor et argent)."

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.

Railways have proved among the greatest, as well as the latest, of the

agents of destruction. In our island various cherished antiquities have

been often most unnecessarily swept away in constructing these

race-courses for the daily rush and career of the iron horse. His rough

and ponderous hoof, for example, has kicked down, at one extremity of a

railway connected with Edinburgh (marvellously and righteously to the

dispeace of the whole city), that fine old specimen of Scottish

Second-Pointed architecture, the Trinity College Church; while, at the

other extremity of the same line, it battered into fragments the old

Castle of Berwick, a fort rich in martial and Border memories, and a

building rendered interesting by the fact, that in connection with one

of its turrets there was--at the command of Edward I. "the greatest of

the Plantagenets," (as his latest biographer boastfully terms

him)--constructed, some six centuries ago, a cage of iron and wood, in

which he immured, with Bomba-like ferocity, for four weary years, a poor

prisoner, and that prisoner a woman--the Countess of Buchan--whose

frightful crime consisted in having assisted at the coronation of her

liege sovereign, Robert the Bruce. In the construction of the Edinburgh

and Glasgow Railway the line was driven, with annihilating effect,

through the centre of the old and rich Roman Station on the Wall of

Antoninus at Castlecary. Some years ago, as I passed along the line, I

saw the farmer in the immediate neighbourhood of this station busily

removing a harmless wall,--among the last, if not the very last remnants

of Roman masonry in Scotland. The largest stone circle near the English

Border--the Stonehenge or Avebury of the north of England--formerly

stood near Shap. The stone avenues leading to it are said to have been

nearly two miles in length. The engineer of the Carlisle and Lancaster

railway carried his line right through the very centre of the ancient

stone circle forming the head of the chief avenue, leaving a few of its

huge stones standing out on the western side, where they may be still

seen by the passing traveller about half a mile south of the Shap

station. If the line had been laid only a few feet on either side, the

wanton desecration and destruction of this fine archaic monument might

have been readily saved. Railway engineers, however, and railway

directors, care far more for mammon and money than for mounds and

monoliths.

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.

In many parts of our country our old sepulchral cairns, hill-forts,

castles, churches, and abbeys, have been most thoughtlessly and

reprehensibly allowed, by those that chanced to be their proprietors for

the time, to be used as mere quarries of ready stones for the building

of villages and houses, and for the construction of field-dikes and

drains. In the perpetration of this class of sad and discreditable

desecrations, many parties are to blame. Such outrages have been

practised by both landlord and tenant, by both State and Church; and I

fear that the Presbyterian Church of Scotland is by no means free from

much culpability in the matter. But let us, at the same time, rejoice

that a better spirit is awakened on the whole question; and let us hope

that our Scottish landlords will all speedily come to imitate, when

required, the excellent example of Mr. Baillie, who, when some years ago

he found that one of his tenants had pulled down and carried off, for

building purposes, some portions of the walls of the four grand old

burgs standing in Glenelg, in Inverness-shire, prosecuted the delinquent

farmer before the sheriff-court of the county, and forced him to restore

and replace _in situ_, as far as possible, and at his own expense, all

the stones which he had removed.

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.