ornaments, and the like, are found mingling with the sword and spear of the rude barbarian chief. Still, there are personal decorations, and especially bead necklaces, bracelets, and some of the smaller and more delicate armillæ, which we can hardly err in classing among female adornments. The subject, however, is well deserving of further attention; and the more so, as the evidence which is available in the case of sepulchral remains is of so satisfactory and decisive a character when reported on by competent witnesses. There can be no doubt, from the disclosures of numerous tumuli and cists, that the dead were frequently buried "in their habits as they lived," and with all their most prized personal adornments upon them; though time has made sad havoc of their funeral pomp, and scarcely allows a glimpse even of the naked skeleton that crumbles into dust under our gaze.

The rudest of the personal ornaments found in sepulchral mounds, or in the safer chance depository of the bogs, are those formed of bone or horn. But such relics are necessarily of rare occurrence, not only from the remoteness of the period to which we conceive them to belong, but from the frail nature of the material in which they have been wrought. This, when deposited among the memorials of the dead, yields to decay not greatly less rapidly than the remains it should adorn. Still some few of those fragile relics have been preserved, consisting of perforated beads of bone, horn pins, perforated animals' teeth, and other equally rude fragments of necklaces or pendants; but very few of them present much attempt at artificial decoration by means of incised ornaments or carving, such as is found to have been so extensively practised in a later age. One curious set of bone ornaments in the Scottish Museum includes a piece of ivory pierced with a square

perforation, and another with a nut or button fitting into it the clasp or fibula it may be of the robe of honour worn by some ancient chief.

Next in seeming antiquity to the traces of human art in the drift, if not in some cases coeval with them, are the numerous implements and personal ornaments embedded in the bone-breccia of ossiferous caverns, such as the cylindrical rods and large rings or armlets of fossil ivory lying alongside the skull of the elephant, in Goat Hole Cave, Glamorganshire; or others intermingled with the bones of extinct mammals beneath the stalag mitic flooring of Kent's Hole cavern. To some of those

cave-relics attention has already been directed; but they also furnish materials illustrative of the present section, and show at how early a stage in the progress of human arts the ingenious workman found leisure to devote his skill and labour to the manufacture of personal ornaments. Near the entrance of the famous Devonshire cavern at Torbay, embedded in mould which had acquired the consistency of hard clay, Mr. MacEnery describes his discovery of numerous articles in bone, including not only arrow-heads, but also slender, rounded pins or bodkins, about three inches long, and wrought to a point; and a flat implement of polished bone, broad at one end, pointed at the other, but at the broad part retaining the form of a comb, the teeth of which had been broken off near their root. Pursuing his researches, the intelligent explorer further records :"Towards the second mouth, on the same level, were found pieces of pottery. The most remarkable products of this gallery were round pieces of blue slate, about an inch and a half in diameter, and a quarter thick. In the same quarter were found several round pieces of sandstone grit, about the form and size of a dollar, but thicker, and rounded at the edge, and in the centre

pierced with a hole, by means of which they seem to have been strung together like beads." The perforated stones of Kent's Hole Cave are more probably the tablemen used in games of chance or skill, which come under review on a subsequent page. In their rudest and most primitive forms, however, it is not always easy to discriminate between them and similar objects designed for personal decoration or for domestic industrial skill. Stone beads wrought with laborious art mingle with other relics of the same common material, in the gravemounds, as well as in weems, and the stray deposits of drift and moss. The woodcut represents examples of perforated stone balls, such as are frequently met with, to which it may be convenient to apply the name of

Bead-stones. Some of them are decorated with incised lines, and may have been worn as marks of distinction, or as personal ornaments held in great esteem; as they are not uncommon among the relics deposited in the cist or cinerary urn. Others of them more nearly resemble the stone weights used with the distaff, and have accordingly received in Germany the name of Spindelstein. The Scottish whorle, or fly of the spinning-rock, however, is still familiar to us, and only very partially corresponds to these perforated balls. It consists generally of a flattened disc, much better adapted for the motion required. But independently of this, those simple ornaments have been found alongside of male skeletons, and

in such numbers as might rather induce the belief that— where they are not the set of table-men with which the deceased was wont to beguile his hours of leisure, they had formed a badge, or official collar, esteemed as no less honourable than the golden links of rue and thistle worn by the knights of St. Andrew at the court of the Scottish Jameses.

On demolishing a cairn at Dalpatrick, in Lanarkshire, a few years ago, it was found to cover a cist enclosing an urn, and in the surrounding heap were discovered another urn about six inches high, a smaller vessel of baked clay, and a curious whinstone of roundish form, about four inches in diameter, and perforated with a circular hole.1 Perforated balls and discs of slate are of common occurrence in Portpatrick parish, Wigtonshire, and are also met with in other districts.2 "In one of the Orkney graves," says Barry, "was found a number of stones formed into the shape and size of whorles, like those that were formerly used for spinning in Scotland."3 Two of these bead-stones in the Museum of the Scottish Antiquaries were discovered in Dumbartonshire, along with various smaller ones, some of them of glass and undoubtedly designed as ornaments. But other examples, more in the form of a truncated cone, are referred to in a later chapter as the table-men for a game somewhat similar to that of draughts, and still called by the Germans Brettsteine. Larger perforated stones have also been repeatedly found. Mr. Joseph Train describes several obtained in Galloway, five or six inches in diameter, one of which, in his own possession, as black and glossy as polished ebony, had been picked up in the ruins of an old byre, where its latest use had

1 New Statist. Acc. Lanarkshire, vol. vi. p. 734.

Ibid. Wigtonshire, vol. iv. p. 142.

3 Barry's Orkney, p. 206.

no doubt been, in accordance with the ideas of that district, to counteract the spells of witchcraft.'

Ornaments of jet or shale and cannel coal, and large beads of glass and pebble, are of frequent occurrence in the Scottish grave-mounds, and furnish extremely interesting and varied evidence of the decorative arts of remote ages. Many of those, however, are found under circumstances which leave no room to doubt that they belong to periods coeval with the introduction of metals, and the skill acquired in the practice of metallurgy; or even to later times when the arts of historic races were effacing the last traces of primeval ingenuity.

There is another class of relics, however, which we can feel no hesitation in ranking among early remains of the Stone Period; though it may sometimes be difficult to determine whether we should regard them as mere personal ornaments or as charms employed in the rites of Pagan superstition: as it is not uncommon to find them used, at a very recent date, by their modern inheritors in some of the remoter districts of the Highlands and Isles. One relic, for example, in the Scottish Museum, consists of a flat reddish stone, roughly polished. It measures 4 inches in length, and about 2 inches in its greatest breadth, and is notched in a regular form, with two holes perforated through it. It was presented to the Society of Antiquaries in 1784, as a charm in use among the population of the island of Islay for the cure of diseases. From its correspondence with others of the earliest class of relics, it can hardly admit of a doubt that it belongs to the personal ornaments of the Stone Period, and may have owed the reverence of its more recent possessor to the fact of its discovery within some primitive cist, or in the charmed circle of Taoursanan, the origin of which is commonly ascribed to superhuman

1 New Statist. Acc. Kirkcudbrightshire, vol. iv. p. 196.