established as to admit of their separate classification without risk of error or confusion, the British collections, with their ample store of Anglo-Roman relics, will furnish a far more comprehensive demonstration of national history than those northern galleries, which must remain destitute of any native examples of an influence no less abundantly visible in their literature and arts, than in that of nations which received it directly from the source. In this respect the Scottish antiquary is peculiarly fortunate in the field of observation he occupies. While he possesses the legionary inscriptions, the sepulchral tablets, the sculptures, pottery, and other native products of Roman colonists or invaders, he has also an extensive and strictly defined field for the study of primitive antiquities, almost as perfectly free from the disturbing elements of foreign art as the most secluded regions of ancient Scandinavia. PART I. THE PRIMEVAL OR STONE PERIOD. "Cum prorepserunt primis animalia terris, Mutum et turpe pecus, glandem atque cubilia propter CHAPTER I. THE PRIMEVAL TRANSITION. THE closing epoch of geology, which embraces the diluvial formations, is that in which archæology has its beginning. In a zoological point of view, it includes man and the existing races of animals, as well as the extinct races which appear to have been contemporaneous with indigenous species. Archæology also lays claim to the still more recent alluvium, with all its included relics pertaining to the historic period. Within the legitimate scope of this department of investigation are comprehended the entire evidence of changes on the geographical features of the country, on its coasts and harbours, its estuaries, rivers, and plains: all properly coming within the limits of Archæology, though too extensive to be embraced in the present review of its elements. This much, however, we learn from an examination of the detritus and its included fossils, that at the period immediately preceding the occupation of the British Islands by their first colonists, the country must have been almost entirely covered with forests, and over run by numerous races of animals long since extinct. Much has been done in recent years to complete the history of British fossil mammalia; and though less attention has been paid to the question in which we are here most deeply interested, as to what portion of them are to be considered as having been contemporaneous with man, yet on this also interesting light has been thrown. The most extensive discoveries of mammalian remains and recent shells generally occur along the valleys by which the present drainage of the country takes place, and hence we infer that little change has taken place in its physical conformation since their deposition. These, however, include the mammoth, elephant, rhinoceros, cave tiger, with other extinct species, and are referrible to the earlier portion of an epoch, with the close of which we have alone to deal. They belong to that period in which our planet was passing through its very latest stage of preparation prior to its occupation by man; a period on which the geologist, who deals with phenomena of the most gigantic character, and with epochs of vast duration, is apt to dwell with diminished interest, but which excites in the thoughtful mind a keener sympathy than all that preceded it. The general geographical disposition of the globe was then nearly as it still remains. Our own island was, during a great portion of it, insulated, as it is now. Yet it is of this familiar locality that the paleontologist remarks:-"In this island, anterior to the deposition of the drift, there was associated with the great extinct tiger, bear, and hyæna of the caves, in the destructive task of controlling the numbers of the richly developed order of the herbivorous mammalia, a feline animal [the Machairodus latidens] as large as the tiger, and, to judge by its instruments of destruction, of greater ferocity." It was 1 Owen's British Fossil Mammals, p. 179. within the epoch to which those strange mammals belong, and while some of them, and many other contemporaneous forms of being, still animated the scene, that man was introduced. Of this the evidence has accumulated in recent years to an extent which startles the most ardent inquirer by its novel revelations. In the drift gravel of France and England the flint implements which reveal the presence of man have been found by hundreds, in immediate juxtaposition with the bones of the fossil mastodon, rhinoceros, and other extinct mammals; and, as it now appears, the evidence of this had long since been known, though misinterpreted, until attention was recalled to the unheeded disclosures of implements of flint in the drift-gravel of Kent and Suffolk, by recent discoveries of a like nature at Abbeville and Amiens.1 The remains of the gigantic fossil elk (Megaceros Hibernicus) have been found under circumstances which appear to prove its coexistence with man. Its bones occurred along with those of the Rhinoceros tichorhinus, the Elephas primigenius, and numerous other extinct mammals, in the sepulchral cave at Aurignac, in the south of France, along with human bones; and in a condition which satisfied their discoverer, M. Lartet, and other intelligent observers, that they were the refuse left from human repasts. In the recently explored Brixham cave, on the Devonshire coast, similar remains of the fossil rhinoceros, along with the Equus caballus, the Cervus tarandus, or rein-deer, and several of the extinct cave carnivora, lay embedded in the same breccia with flint knives; and by more direct and ample evidence it has been shown that the north of Europe was occupied by the human race at a 1 Archæologia, vol. xiii. p. 204; xxxviii. p. 301. 2 Natural History Review, January 1862. time when not only the Bos primigenius, and the Bison priscus, but the Ursus spelaus, existed. Of the Ursus spelæus, or great cave bear, a skeleton is preserved in the museum of Lund, found in a peat-bog in Scania, under a gravel or stone deposit, alongside of primitive implements of the chase; and Professor Owen, after referring the period of its existence to earlier geological epochs, adds, as the conclusion suggested by present evidence, "that the genus surviving, or under a new specific form reappearing, after the epoch of the deposition and dispersion of those enormous, unstratified, superficial accumulations of marine and fresh-water shingle and gravel, called drift and diluvium, has been continued during the formation of vast fens and turbaries upon the present surface of the island, and until the multiplication and advancement of the human race introduced a new cause of extermination, under the powerful influence of which the Bear was finally swept away from the indigenous fauna of Great Britain." To the native mammals may be added the roebuck, the red and fallow deer, the wild boar, the brown bear, the wolf, the beaver, and the goat, all of which have undoubtedly existed as wild animals. in this country, and been gradually domesticated or extirpated by man.3 1 British Association for Advancement of Science, Report for 1847, p. 31; and Owen, Introd. p. xxxiii.; p. 462. 2 Owen's British Fossil Mammals, p. 107. 3 Ilid. p. 197. The abundance of wild beasts and game of all kinds in the Caledonian forests is frequently alluded to. Boece describes "gret plente of haris, hartis, hindis, dayis, rais, wolffis, wild hors, and toddis" (Bellenden's Boece. Cosmographe, chap. xi.) The following curious enumeration in Gordon's History of the House of Sutherland (fol. p. 3.) circa 1630, furnishes a tolerably extensive list of wild natives of Sutherland even in the seventeenth century :-"All these forrests and schases are verie profitable for feiding of bestiall, and delectable for hunting. They are full of reid deir and roes, woulffs, foxes, wyld catts, brocks, skuyrrells, whittrets, weasels, otters, martrixes, hares, and fumarts. In these forrests, and in all this province, ther is great store of partriges, pluivers, capercalegs, blackwaks, mure |