omened pilgrimage. Has not He enjoined obedience to the authors of our being as the first of all social duties; and rely upon it, whoever wilfully and deliberately breaks the commandment, retribution will follow them sooner or later."

"Yet the punishment was visited upon Francis Clairfait," whispered a voice from the group of condolers, " and he had been guilty of no sin.” "No sin!" echoed the Italian, whilst a strange assumption of power appeared in his voice and manner, making those around him quail, as before a superior being. "Believe me, my friends, this sin of Maria's, which you have been commenting on, was but venial carelessness compared with his. He was an acknowledged heretic, possessing no more inheritance in the next world than the beasts of the field-nay, worse, for they die and are forgotten, whilst an immortal soul must meet its punishment. He was a man accursed of the Church, lying under its ban, as all such must of needs lie."

"Yet he had all estimable qualities," Hulda Ernach ventured to remark," and was an earnest follower of his own mistaken religion."

“Had his qualities been such as to render him a rival in goodness to One who once came upon the earth, and who never can be rivalled, they would avail him nothing," replied the Italian, turning upon Hulda a glance which made her shudder. "There is NO pardon or escape for those who dare to differ from the sole true and Universal Church and its Supreme Head, the direct descendant from the apostle St. Peter. You know, my friends, the implicit obedience the Church exacts from you—that should Satan tempt you to rebel, even in the slightest degree, from the absolute and unconditional submission to her priesthood, whatever they may teach, from that moment you are hurled beyond her shelter, and consigned to eternal perdition."

They all knew it perfectly well.

"Whilst the followers of his accursed creed dare to think for themselves, and he revelled openly in its doctrines, the best thought he had for ours was contempt-his sweetest word for our sacred ceremonies one of derision-the Holy See itself was to him a nullity."

The ladies groaned and crossed themselves, even Hulda Ernach.

"Was it meet to suppose the saints, those blessed martyrs of our religion, who suffered in its cause, and now look down from their thrones on high to protect us, would permit a longer continuance here to one, who, in addition to his own apostasy, endeavoured to subvert the faithful ?"

"Alas! alas!" bewailed all the listeners.

"The divine wrath was prayed for upon him, my friends, and it has fallen," concluded Romelli. "Be it our province to supplicate, untiringly,

for the extirmination of all such."

THE "BOAT-HEADED" OR PRIMEVAL SCOTS.*

THE zeal for archæological investigation which has recently manifested itself in nearly every country of Europe, has been traced, in Scotland, to the impulse which proceeded from Abbotsford. Though such, Mr. Daniel Wilson justly remarks, is not exactly the source which we might expect to give birth to the transition from profitless dilettantism to the intelligent spirit of scientific investigation, yet it is unquestionable that Sir Walter Scott was the first of modern writers "to teach all men this truth, which looks like a truism, and yet was as good as unknown to writers of history and others till so taught that the bygone ages of the world were actually filled by living men."†

This being the case, and the history of the manners and customs of bygone races of men being the acknowledged aim and object of the archæologist, it is almost startling to find that in a great and elaborate work, devoted by its author to the elucidation of national antiquities, and to the recovery of the earliest traces of Scottish arts and civilisation-instead of a British or Caledonian, a Scandinavian, Celtic, or Pictish, and a Roman epoch, or simply a Pagan and a Christian era-we have a primeval or stone period; an archaic or bronze period; and a Teutonic or iron period! The reader's thoughts are involuntarily forced back to the Augustan poet's ideas of golden, silver, brazen, and iron ages; his fancy pictures forth a museum of antiquities instead of a once living world; and he anticipates being ushered into the vestibule of Abbotsford, instead of hospitably partaking of the waters of life, with which the genius of the place gave body and substance, and an undying interest to every celt or cromlech, to every claymore or shield, and to every monument of art or writing of olden time.

Great then will be the reader's relief to find, upon careful perusal of the work before him, that the author was not only justified in adopting a classification founded on monumental remains, instead of on the races to whom they belonged, but that he had no other choice; for the primeval or aboriginal people of Scotland belonged to no cognate race, and could not, therefore, be classed precisely as Britons or Caledonians, and certainly not as Celts, or even Scandinavians.

We find, indeed, throughout the pages of Mr. Daniel Wilson's work a genuine devotion to ethnology, as a science without which the study of primitive antiquities can never be made to take its place as the indispensable basis of all written history. It has hitherto been the misfortune of the archæologist, that his most recondite pursuits are peculiarly exposed to the laborious idling of the mere dabblers in science, so that they alternately assume to the uninterested observer the aspect of frivolous pastime and of solemn trifling. "I cannot but think," says Mr. Wilson, "that a direct union with the associated sciences, and an incorporation especially with the kindred researches of the ethnologist, while it might, perchance, give some of its present admirers a distate for the severer and more restricted study, would largely contribute to its real advance

*The Archæology and Pre-historic Annals of Scotland. By Daniel Wilson, Honorary Secretary of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. Simpkin and Marshall. † Carlyle's Miscellanies. Second Edition. Vol. v., p. 301.

ment, and free its truly zealous students from many popular trammels which at present cumber its progress."

The facilities afforded to the Scandinavian archæologist by the purity of his primitive remains, and the freedom of his ethnographic chronicles from those violent intercalations of foreign elements, which render both the ethnology and the historical antiquities of Central Europe so complicated and difficult of solution, peculiarly fitted him for originating such a comprehensive and refined system as that which has been adopted by Mr. Wilson in treating of the antiquities of Scotland.

While in England the Anglo-Saxon element is recognised as the predominating source of later changes, and the character of genuine Roman antiquities is well ascertained, Mr. Wilson discards the idea of the other native relics having assigned to them a Scandinavian origin. It is not, he says, a mere question between Northman or Dane, and Celt or Saxon. It involves the entire chronology of the pre-historic British periods; and so long as it remains unsettled, any consistent arrangement of our archæological data into a historical sequence is impossible.

The oldest intelligible inscription known in Scotland is that graven in Anglo-Saxon Runes on the Ruthwell Cross, Dumfriesshire, and dating not earlier than the ninth century. The oldest written historic documents are probably the charters of Duncan, engrossed about the year 1035, and still preserved among the muniments of Durham Cathedral. Prior to these the Romans furnish some scanty notes concerning the barbarian Picti. The Irish annalists contribute brief but valuable additions. The northern sagas, it is now certain, contain a still richer store of early historic notes, which the antiquaries of Copenhagen are busily digesting for us into available materials. Yet, after all these are ransacked, what shall we make, asks Mr. Wilson, of the long era which intervenes between the dispersion of the human family and the peopling of the British isles? When did the first rude prow touch our shores ?-who were its daring crew? Whence did language, manners, nationality, civilisation, and letters spring?

"Large are the treasures of oblivion," beautifully observes Sir Thomas Browne. "Much more is buried in silence than recorded; and the largest volumes are but epitomes of what hath been. The account of Time began with night, and darkness still attendeth it." Yet, despite this great difficulty, Ritson has already carried back the supposed limits of authentic Caledonian history fully a thousand years before the obscurity that daunted Lord Hailes. Chalmers, Gregory, Skene, and other zealous investigators, have followed or emulated him in the same bold inquiry. Zealous archæologists like Mr. Daniel Wilson go still much further back. With them, 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, we need scarcely add, also lays claim to the still more recent alluvium, with all its included relics pertaining to the historic period. In fact, archæology only differs from geology in as much as the latter interests itself with the structure of the crust of the earth, and records the succession of animal creations: archæology takes up the same history from the period of the advent of man.

In discussing the co-existence of the gigantic fossil elk (Cervus Euryceros) with the human species, Mr. Wilson has overlooked the

notice and drawing of this animal obtained by Dr. Hibbert from a scarce folio work by Sebastian Munster, which records the existence of that animal, or of a species very closely allied to it, in Prussia, so late as the year 1550. This same co-existence has also been shown in respect to the great fossil ox (Bos primigenius), the great cave bear (Ursus spelæus), the Bison priscus, the large cave hyæna, and probably many other fossil animals, including the great feline animal (Machairodus Latideus), more powerful and more ferocious probably than the tiger of the present day. We saw, in treating of the Great Forests of Antiquity, in a late number of the New Monthly, that tradition speaks of many of these animals as haunting the Ardennes within historical times, and skeletons of some have been dug up alongside of primitive implements of the chase. When the aboriginal colonists entered on the possession of the British islands, it appears, indeed, that the country must have been almost entirely covered with forests, and overrun by numerous races of animals long since extinct. Among these were not only the great fossil ox, but also the bison, or great urus, and a smaller species (Bos longifrous), which appears to have been the domesticated ox of the native population prior to the intrusion of the Romans. But while the co-existence of man with these extinct forms of animal life furnish most interesting evidence of the very remote period at which the presence of a human population is discoverable in Britain, it appears also that abundance of wild animals continued to occupy the moors and forests of Scotland long after the primitive states of society had passed away.

The history of the aboriginal traces, as recorded by Mr. Wilson, form, in our idea, one of the most interesting and striking portions of his labours. The canoes of Lochar Moss, the Loch of Doon, and many other places, take precedence among these relics. One of these canoes, dug out from five fathoms deep in the carse of Falkirk, was pronounced by Sir John Clerk, well known as an enthusiastic Scottish antiquary of the last century, from the series of superincumbent strata, to have been an antediluvian boat! In Blair Drummond Moss the skeletons of whales have been found, and beside them the rude harpoons of deer's horn of the hardy Caledonian whaler:

Here, surely (says Mr. Wilson), is common ground for the antiquary and the geologist. The rude harpoon left beside the bones of the stranded whale, far up in the alluvial valley of the Firth-the oaken querne, the wheel, and the arrowheads-the boats beneath the city cross of Glasgow, the centre of a busy populalation for the last thousand years-the primitive ship, as we may almost term the huge canoe on the banks of the Carron-and the tiny craft just found near the waters of the Ythan-all speak, in no doubtful language, of the presence of a human population at a period when the geographical features of the country, and the relative levels of land and sea, must have differed very remarkably from what we know of them at the earliest ascertained epoch of definite history. They point to a time within the historic era when the ocean tides ebbed and flowed over the carse of Stirling, at a depth sufficient to admit of the gambols of the whale where now a child might ford the brawling stream, and when the broad estuary of the Clyde flung its waves to the shore not far from the high ground where the first cathedral of St. Mungo was founded, A.D. 560.

Whatever view the geologist may take of these phenomena—whether he assumes the standing of the whole ocean at higher levels within so recent a period, or adopts the theory of local upheaval and denudationstill the lapse of many ages must be conceded to changes occurring since the first population of Caledonia of so remarkable and so extensive a character.

Among the sepulchral memorials of the same primitive era are, first, the barrows, which may be described as consisting of the long barrow; the bowl barrow; the bell barrow; the conoid barrow; the crowned barrow, such as that of Stonerand, in Birsa, with one or more standing stones set upon it; the enclosed barrow, a circular tumulus, of the usual proportions, and most frequently also conoid in form, but environed by an earthern vallum; and the encircled barrow, generally of large proportions, and surrounded by a circle of standing stones. The two latter are of frequent occurrence in Scotland. The most numerous and remarkable of all the Scottish sepulchral mounds, both for number and size, are the stone tumuli, or cairns. They abound in almost every district of the country, and are frequently of much larger dimensions than the earthern tumuli. They appear, indeed, to have ranked, at a remote period, among the most distinguished honours awarded to the illustrious dead. Another remarkable, though much rarer, sepulchral monument is the cromlech. "The Wiltshire of Scotland," Mr. Wilson remarks, "in so far as the mere number of sepulchral mounds, along with the monolithic groups, and other aboriginal structures, can constitute this distinction, is the mainland of Orkney, with one or two of the neighbouring isles."

Mr. Wilson considers the long barrow as the oldest form of sepulchral memorial, as no metallic implements have as yet been found in such. Within these barrows we find, however, cists and urns, stone arrow-heads, knives, and polished stones. Stone weapons and implements are also of frequent occurrence in the circular tumulus and the bowl barrow; but the enclosed and the encircled barrows, frequently of large dimensions, indicate by their contents that they belong to a later era, when the metallurgic arts had been introduced. In various instances the contents of the enclosed barrow, or tumulus surrounded with an earthern vallum, prove it to belong to the Roman era. The crowned and encircled barrows closely resemble a class of monuments which abound in Sweden and Denmark, while they are of rare occurrence in England. What are called ship barrows, from their peculiar form-oblong mounds, terminating in a point at both ends are also met with in Scotland; and Mr. Wilson attributes their origin, in most instances, to the Vikings, who invaded and colonised the coasts of Scotland at the close of the Pagan period. The barrow does not appear to have been entirely superseded until some time after the introduction of Christianity into Scotland. The cairn appears to have been completely incorporated with the ideas of the people, from the remotest period of the rude stone implements to the close of Pagan customs and sepulchral rites, and is described by our author as a Celtic monument. Wherefore, when it dates as far back as any other primeval monument of the aborigines, does not appear at all clear. A proverbial expression, still in use among the Scottish Highlanders, is, "Curri mi clach er do cuirn" (I will add a stone to your cairn-i.e., I will honour your memory when you are gone). The accumulation of alluvium and peat-moss over the more ancient cairns of Scotland constitutes an interesting natural chronometer of frequent occurrence in connexion with these rude memorials of primitive habits, furnishing unmistakeable evidence of the remoteness of the era to which they belong.

The cromlech, by far the most laborious and costly memorial which the veneration or gratitude of primitive ages dedicated to the honour of their illustrious dead, is rare in Scotland when compared with other stone monuments that abound in almost every district of the country. One of