To The People of Scotland, From Whose Ranks Mainly Have Sprung The Philosophers And Divines, The Poets, Writers, And Martyrs, Who Have Been The Glory Of Their Country.

While Alexander was Overruning the world by his arms, and Greece was enlightening it with her arts, Scotland lay hidden beneath the cloud of barbarianism, and had neither name nor place among the nations of the earth. Its isolation, however was not complete and absolute. Centuries before the great Macedonian had commenced his victorious career, the adventurous navigators of the Phoenician seaboard had explored the darkness of the hyperbborean ocean. The First to steer by the pole- star, they boldly adventured where less skilful mariners would have feared to penetrate. Within the Hazy confine of the North Sea they descried an island, swathed in a mild if humid air, and disclosing the eye, behind its frontier screen of chalk cliffs, the pleasing prospect of wooded hills and far expanding meadows, roamed over by numerous herds, and dotted by the frequent wattle- built hamlets of its rude inhabitants. The Phoenicians oft revisited this remote, and to all but themselves unknown shore, 2 but the enriching trade which they carried on with it they retained for centuries in their own hands. Their ships might be seen passing out at the “Pillars of Hercules” on voyages of unknown destination, and, after the lapse of months, they would return laden with the products of regions, which had found as yet no name on the chart of geographer. 1 But the source of this trade they kept a secret from the rest of the nations. By and by, however, it began to be rumored that the fleets seen going and returning on these mysterious voyages traded with an island that lay far north, and which was rich in a metal so white and lustrous that it had begun to be used as a substitute for silver. In this capacity it was employed how to lend a meretricious glitter to the robe of the courtezan, and now to impart a more legitimate splendor to the mantle of the magistrate.

In the process of time other sea- faring peoples, taught by the example of the Phoenicians to sail by the stars, and to brave terrors in pursuit of wealth, followed in the track which these early merchants had seen the first to open. The tin of cornwall and of the Scilly Islands, the “Cassiterides” of the ancients, began to circulate among the nations of Asia Minor, and was not unknown even to the tribes of the Arabian desert. It is interesting to think that Britain had already begun to benefit nations which knew not as yet to pronounce her name. But it was on the Syrian shore, and among the maritime tribes that nestled in the bays of Lebanon, that the main stream of this traffic continued to diffuse its various riches. The wealth and power of the Phoenician state were largely owing to its trade with Britain. Its capital, Sidon, was nursed by the produce of our mines into early greatness. The site of Rome was still morass; the cities of Greece were only mean hamlets; the palaces of Babylon were brick- built structures; and Jerusalem was but a hill fort; while Sidon had risen in splendor and grown to a size that made men speak of her, evening the age of Joshua, as the “Great Sidon”

Nor was Sidon the only city on that shore that owed its greatness to the remote and barbarous Britain. Tyre, the daughter of Sidon, feeding her power at the same distant springs, came ultimately to surpass in wealth , and eclipses in beauty, the mother city. No sublimer ode has come down to us than that which has as its burden the greatness and the fall of Tyre- the number of her ships, the multitude of her merchants, the splendor of her palaces, the exceeding loftiness of her pomp and pride, and the dark night in which her day of if glory was to close.

The bronzed gates set up by Shalmaneezer to commemorate his triumphs, exhumed but the other day from the ruined mounds of Assyria, present to modern eyes a vivid picture of the greatness of the Phoenician cities. On these gates Tyre is seen seated on her island- rock, encompassed by strong walls, with other serrated battlements and flanking towers. A broad avenue leads from her gates to the sea. Down this path is being borne her rich and various merchandise, which we see ferried across to the mainland. Ingots of gold and silver, rare woods, curious bowls, precious stones, spices, dyed clothes, embroidered garments, and similar products, brought from far off lands, form the tribute which we here see laid at the feet of the conqueror Shalmanezer. The monarch in his robes of state, a tiara on his head, stands a little in advance of a brilliant staff of officers and princes, while an attendant eunuch shades him with a richly embroidered umbrella from the hot Syrian sun, and a deputation of Tyrian merchants offer him the submission of the now tributary city. This was in the year B. C. 859. f1 But though the doom foretold by the prophet has long since fallen upon this ancient mistress of the seas, her ruin is not so utter but that we may trace at this day the dimensions of those harbors from which the fleets engaged in the traffic with Britain set sail, and where, on their return, they discharged their rich cargos. The harbors of Tyre, as their ruins, still visible below the waves, show, had an average area of twelve acres. The ports of Sidon were of a somewhat larger capacity. Their average area was twenty acres, so do the scholars of the “Palestine Exploration” tell us. We who are familiar with the “Leviathans” that plow the deep in modern times, cannot but feel surprise at the diminutive size of the craft employed in the Tyrian traffic, as judged of by the limited capacity of the basins in which they unloaded their wares. A modern ironclad would hardly venture into a port of so diminutive a size. But if the ships of Tyre were of small tonnage, so much greater the evidence of the skill and courage of the crews that manned them, and the enterprise of the merchants that sent them forth on such distant voyages. And it is pleasant to reflect that even at that early age, the riches of our mines formed an important factor in the commercial activity, the artistic taste, and the varied grandeur, of which the narrow strip of territory that stretches along on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, beneath the cliffs of Lebanon, was then the seat. f2 The palmiest era of the Phoenician commerce was from the twelfth to the sixth century before Christ. It follows, that Britain, with whom these early merchants traded, was then inhabited, and probably had been so for some considerable time previous. At what time did the first immigrants arrive on its shore, and from what quarter did they come? We cannot tell the year, nor even the century, when the first wanderer from across the sea sighted its cliffs, and moored his bark on its strand; nor can we solve the question touching the first peopling of our island, otherwise than by an approximating process. In a brief discussion of this point, we shall avail ourselves of the guidance furnished by great ethnological principles and facts, as well as of the help given us by historic statements.

The earliest and most authentic of all histories- for the monumental and historic evidence of the Bible does not lessen but grow with the current of the centuries- tells us that the Ark rested, after the flood, on one of the mountains of Ararat. Here, at the center of the earth, is placed the second cradle of the human family, and to this point are we to trace up all the migrations of mankind. The Ark might have been set down by the retiring waters on the verge of Asia, or on the remotest boundary of America; or it might have been floated on currents, or driven by winds far into the polar regions. Escaping all these mischances, here, the central regions of the world, and probably within sight of those plains with which Noah had been familiar before the flood overspread the earth, did the Ark deposit its burden. It was the first great providential act towards the human family in post- diluvian times.

Let us take our stand beside “the world’s grey fathers,” and survey with them, from the summits where the ark is seen to rest, the singular framework of rivers, mountains, and plains spread out around the spot. The various fortunes and destinies of their descendants lie written before the eyes of the first fathers of mankind on the face of the silent earth; for undoubted it is that in the geographical arrangements of the globe is so far laid the ground- work of the history, political and moral, of its nations. The physical conditions of a region assist insensibly but powerfully in shaping the mental and moral peculiarities of its inhabitants, and prognosticate dimly the events of which any particular region is to become the theatre. The mountainchains that part kingdoms, the oceans that divide continents by diversifying the climatic influences of the globe, enrich that “one blood” of which all the nations of the earth partake, and by engendering a difference of temperament and aptitude, and stimulating to a variety of pursuit prepare more variously endowed instrumentalities for the world’s work, and impart to history a breadth, a variety, and grandeur which otherwise would have been lacking to it.

From this new starting point of the race great natural pathways are soon to stretch out in all directions. In the heart of the Armenian mountains, close to the resting place of the ark, four great rivers take their rise, and proceeding thence in divergent courses, flow towards the four quarters of the globe. A tribe or colony in quest of habitations naturally follows the course of some great stream, seeing the fertility which its waters create along its banks afford pasture for their flocks and food for themselves. Of the four great rivers which here have their birth, the Euphrates turned off to the west, and pointed the way to Palestine and Egypt and Greece. The second of these great streams, the Tigris, sending its floods to the south, and traveling with rapid flow the great plains which lie between the mountains of Armenia and the Persian gulf, would open the road to India and the countries of the East.

The Araxes and the Phasis, rising on the other side of the mountain- chain which here forms the water- shed between Asia and Europe, and flowing towards the north, would draw off, in that direction, no inconsiderable portion of the human tide that was now going forth from this central region to people the wilderness, into which, since the flood, the earth had again reverted. The settlers who proceeded along the banks of the Araxes, whose waters fall into the Caspian, would people the northern and north- eastern lands of Asia. Those who took the Phasis as the guide of their exploring footsteps, would arrive in due time in the west and north of Europe. By the several roads spread out around their starting- point, do these emigrants journey to those distant and unknown homes where their posterity in after ages are to found kingdoms, build cities, become great in arms, or seek renown in the nobler pursuits of peace.

But farther, this mountain- girdle, which is drawn round the middle of the globe, and which has two great river on either side of it flowing in opposite directions and in divergent channels, parts the earth into two grand divisions. It gives us a northern and a southern world. In this striking arrangement we see two stages prepared in anticipation of two great dramas, an earlier and a later, to be enacted after time. The one was destined to introduce, and the other to conclude and crown the business of the world. Let us mark what a difference betwixt the natural endowments of the two zones, yet how perfect the adaptation of each to the races that were to occupy them, and the part these races were to play in the affairs of the world!

On the south of the great mountain- chain which bisected Asia and Europe was a world blessed with the happiest physical conditions. The skies were serene, the air was warm, and the soil was molient and fertile. How manifest is it that this favored region had been prepared with special view to its occupancy by the early races, whose knowledge of the arts did not enable them meanwhile to construct dwellings such as should suffice to protect them from the cold of a northern sky, and whose skill in husbandry was not enough, as yet, to draw from less fertile soils the necessaries of life in sufficient abundance. In this genial clime the inhabitants could dispense with houses of stone; a tent of hair- cloth would better meet their wants; and hardly was it necessary that their exuberant soil should be turned by the plow; without labor almost it would yield the food of man. Here then was meet dwelling- place for the infancy and youth of the human family; the brilliant light, the sparkling waters, the gorgeous tints of the sky, and the rich fruitage of field and tree, would combine to quicken the sensibilities and stimulate the imagination of man, and so fit him for those more elegant acquisitions and those lighter labors in which his youth was to be passed. Here the arts of music and painting grew up, and here, too, passion poured itself forth in poetry and song. In these voluptuous climes man perfected his conceptions as regards symmetry of form and melody of speech, and from these ages and lands have come to us the incomparable models of statuary, of architecture, and of eloquence.

“Graiis dedit ore rotundo Musa loqui.”

Nor, even yet, has the glow of morning altogether left the sky of the world. The pure and beautiful ideals which these young races succeeded in perfecting for us still continue to delight. They exert to this day a refining and elevating influence on the whole of life. Our graver thoughts and more matter- of- fact labors wear something of the golden lacquering of these early times.

On the north of the great mountain- wall which, as we have said, parts the world in two, the ground runs off in a mighty downward slope, diversified by forests and lakes, and furrowed by mountain- chains, and finally terminates in the steppes of Tartary and the frozen lands of Siberia. This vast descent would conduct man by slow journeys from the genial air and teeming luxuriance of his primeval dwelling to the stony soils, the stunted products, and the biting sky of a northern latitude. The boundless plains spread out on this mighty decline refuse their harvests save to the skill of the hand and the sweat of the brow. In vain the inhabitant holds out his cup to have it filled with the spontaneous bounty of the earth. But if nature has denied to these regions the feathery palm, the odorous gum, and the precious jewel, she has provided an ample compensation in having ordained that products of infinitely greater price should here be ripened. This zone was to be the trainingground of the hardier races. Here, in their contests with the ruggedness of nature, were they to acquire the virtues of courage, of perseverance, and of endurance, and by that discipline were they to be prepared to step upon the stage, and take up the weightier business of the world, when the earlier races had fulfilled their mission, and closed their brief but brilliant career. Here, in a word, on these stern soils, and under these tempestuous skies, was to be set that hardy stock on which the precious grafts of liberty and Christianity were to be implanted in days to come. With the advent of the northern races the real business of the world began.

When Noah comes forth from the Ark we see him accompanied by three sons- Shem, Ham, and Japhet. These are the three fountain- heads of the world’s population. “These are the three sons of Noah, and of them was the whole earth overspread.” f3 “Peleg,” who lived in the fifth generation from Noah, is set up as a great finger- post at the parting of the ways, “for in his days was the earth divided.” f4 And it is strikingly corroborative of the truth of this statement, that after four thousand years, during which climate, migration, and numerous other influences have been acting unceasingly on the species, all tending to deepen the peculiarities of race, and to widen the distinctions between nations, the population of the world at this day, by whatever test we try it, whether that of physical characteristic, or by the surer proof of language, is still resolvable into three grand groups, corresponding to the three patriarchs of the race, Shem, Ham, and Japhet.

The descendants of Ham, crossing the narrow bridge between Asia and Africa, the Isthmus of Suez to wit, planted themselves along the banks of the Nile, finding in that rich valley a second plain of Shinar, and in the great river that waters it another Euphrates. Egypt is known by its inhabitants as the land of Mizraim to this day. From the black loamy Delta, which reposes so securely betwixt the two great deserts of the world, and which the annual overflow of the Nile clothes with an eternal luxuriance, Ham spread his swarthy swarms over the African continent. Shem turned his face towards Arabia and India, and his advancing bands, crossing the Indus and the Ganges, overflowed the vast and fertile plains which are bounded by the lofty Himalayas on the one side, and washed by the Indian Ocean on the other. An illustrious member of the Semitic family was recalled westward to occupy Palestine, where his posterity, as the divinely-appointed priesthood of the world, dwelt apart with a glory all their own. Japhet, crossing the mountainous wall which rose like a vast partition betwixt the north and the south, poured the tide of his numerous and hardy descendants down the vast slope of the northern hemisphere over Europe, and the trans- Caucasian regions of Asia, with, at times, a reflex wave that flowed back into the territories of Shem. Thus was the splendid inheritance of a world divided amongst the three sons of Noah.

Our main business is to track the migration of the sons of Japhet, and see by what route they traveled towards our island. From their starting point in the highlands of Armenia, or on the plain of the Euphrates, two great pathways offer themselves, by either of which, or by both, their migrating hordes might reach the shores of the distant Britain. There is the great hollow which Nature has scooped out between the giant Atlas and the mountains of the Alps, and which forms the basin of the Mediterranean Sea. Moving westward through this great natural cleft, and dropping colonies on the fair islands, and by the sheltered bays of its delicious shores, they would people in succession the soil Greece and the countries of Italy and Spain. Pushed on from behind by their ever increasing numbers, or drawn by the powerful attraction of new habitations, they maintain their slow but inevitable advance across the rugged Pyrenees and the broad and fertile plains of France. The van of the advancing horde is now in sight of Albion. They can descry the gleam of its white cliffs across the narrow channel that separates it from the continent; and passing over, they find a land, which, though owned as yet by only the beast of prey, offers enough in the various produce of its soil and the hidden treasures of its rocks to reward them for the toil of their long journey and to induce them to make it the final goal of their wanderings.

By this route, we know, did the clans and tribes springing from Javan- the ION of the Greeks- travel to the west. We trace the footprints of his sons, Elishah, Tarshish, Kittim, and Dodanim all along the northern shore of the Mediterranean, from the Lebanon to the pyrenees, notably in Greece and Italy, less palpably in Cyprus and Spain, attesting to this day the truth of the Bible’s statement, that by them were the “isles of the Gentiles,” that is, the western seaboard of Asia Minor and the northern coast of the Mediterranean, “peopled.”

Meanwhile, another branch of the great Japhethian family is on its way by slow marches to the northern and western world by another route. This great emigrant host proceeds along the great pathways which have been so distinctly traced out by the hand of Nature on the surface of the globe. The Araxes and the Phasis are the guide of their steps. They descend the great slope of northern Asia, and winding round the shores of the Euxine, they thread their way through a boundless maze of river and morass, of meadow and forest, and mountain- chain, and stand at length on the shores of that ocean that washes the flats of Holland and the headlands of Norway: and thus of the human tide which we see advancing towards our island, which is still lying as the waters of the flood had left it, the one division, flowing along through the basin of the Mediterranean, finds egress by the Pillars of Hercules, and the other, rolling down the great northern slope of the Caucasian chain, issues forth at the frozen doors of the Baltic.

This parting of the emigrant host into two great bands, and the sending of them round to their future home by two different routes, had in it a great moral end. There are worse schools for a nation destined for future service, than a long and arduous journey on which they have to suffer hunger and brave danger. The horde of slaves that left Egypt of old, having finished their “forty years” in the “great and terrible wilderness,” emerged on Canaan a disciplined and courageous nation. The route by which these two Japhethian bands journeyed to their final possessions, left on each a marked and indelible stamp. The resemblance between the two at the beginning of their journey, as regards the great features of the Japhethian image, which was common to both, was, we can well imagine, much altered and diversified by the time they had arrived at the end of it, and our country, in consequence, came to be stocked with a race more varied in faculty, richer in genius, and sturdier in intellect than its occupants would probably have been, but for the disciplinary influences to which they were subjected while yet on the road to it. The aborigines of Albion combined the strength of the north with the passion of the south. Of the two great hosts that mingled on its soil, the one, passing under the freezing sky of the Sarmatian plains, and combatting with flood and storm on their way, arrived in their new abode earnest, patient, and courageous. The other, coming round by the bright and genial shores of the Mediterranean, were lively and volatile, and brimming with rich and lofty impulses. Though sprung of the same stock, they came in this way to unite the qualities of different races and climes-the gravity of the Occident with the warm and thrilling enthusiasm of the Orient.

The stream that descended the slopes of the Caucasus, passing betwixt the Caspian and the Euxine, would arrive on our eastern sea- board, and people that part of our island which fronts the German Ocean. The other current, which flowed along by the Mediterranean, and turned northward over France and Spain, would have its course directed towards our western coasts. In the different temperaments that mark the population of the two sides of our island, we trace the vestiges of this long and devious peregrination. The strong Teutonic fiber of our eastern sea- board, and the poetic fire that glows in the men of our western mountains, give evidence at this day of various original endowments in this one population. These mixed qualities are seen working together in the daily life of the people, which exhibits it sustained and fruitful industry, fed and quickened by a latent enthusiasm. The presence of the two qualities is traceable also in their higher and more artistic pursuits, as, for instance, in their literary productions, which, even when they kindle into the passionate glow of the East, are always seen to have as their substratum that cool and sober reason which is the characteristic of the West. Most of all is this line union discernible, on those occasions when a great principle stirs the soul of the nation, and its feelings find vent he an overmastering and dazzling outburst of patriotism.

We do not know the number of links which connected the Patriarch of the Armenian mountains with that generation of his descendants, who were the first to set foot on the shores of Britain; but we seem warranted in concluding that Gomer and Ashkenaz were the two great fathers of the first British population. The nomadic hordes that we see descending the vast slope that leads down to the Scandinavian countries and the coast of the White Sea, are those of Gomer. This much do their footsteps, still traceable, attest. They have their names to the lands over which their track lay, and these memorials, more durable than written record or even pillar of stone, remain to this day, the ineffaceable mementos of that primeval immigration by which Europe was peopled. Here is Gomer- land (Germany) lying on their direct route: for this track was far too extensive and fertile not to commend itself to the permanent occupation of a people on the out- look for new habitations. “The Celts, from the Euxine to the Baltic,” says Pinkerton, “were commonly called Cimmerii, a name noted in Grecian history and fable; and from their antiquity so obscure that a Cimmerian darkness dwells upon them. From the ancients we learn to a certainty, that they were the same people with the Cimbri, and that they extended from the Bosphorus Cimmerius on the Euxine, to the Cimbric Chersonese of Denmark, and to the Rhine.” f5 The main body of these immigrants would squat down on the soil at each successive halt, and only the front rank would be pushed forward into the unpeopled wilderness. Their progress, olden retarded by scarce penetrable forest ,and by swollen river, would be at length conclusively arrested on the shores of the North Sea; and yet not finally even there. Passing over in such craft as their skill enabled them to construct- a fleet of canoes, hollowed out of the trunks of oaks, felled in the German forests- they would take possession of Britain, and begin to people a land, till then a region of silence or solitude, untrodden by human foot since the period of the Flood, if not since the era of the creation.

The new- comers brought with them the tradition of their descent. They called themselves Cymry or Kymbry. They are the Gimirrai of the Assyrian monuments. The Greeks, adopting their own designation, styled them Kimmerioi, and the Latins Cimbri. Cymry is the name by which the aborigines of Britain have uniformly distinguished themselves from the remotest antiquity up to the present hour; and their language, which they have retained through all revolutions, they have invariably called Cymraeg, which means the language of the aborigines, or “the language of the first race.” f6 “It is reasonable to conclude,” says Pinkerton in his learned “Enquiry into the History of Scotland,” “that the north and east of Britain were peopled from Germany by the Cimbri of the opposite shores, who were the first inhabitants of Scotland, who can be traced, from leaving Cumraig names to rivers and mountains, even in the furthest Hebudes.” f7

THERE are three guides which we can summon to our aid when we set out in quest of the cradle of the tribes, races, and nations that people the globe. The first is Philology, or language: the second is Mythology, or worship: and third is Tradition, or folk- lore. These are three guides that will not lie, and that cannot mislead us.

As regards the first, no great power of reflection is needed to convince us that in the first age men conversed with one another in a common language; in other words, that man started with one speech. May not that one speech linger somewhere on the earth, slightly changed and modified, it may be, by time and other influences, but still containing the roots and elemental characteristics of those numerous tongues which are diffused over the earth, and of which it is the parent? This is not a supposition, but a fact. Philology holds in its hand the clue by which it can track all the tongues of the world through the perplexed labyrinth of diverse grammars, idioms, and dialects, to the one primeval tongue of the race. And when we permit philology to perform its office, it conducts us to the great central plain of Asia, called Iran. The researches of Max Muller, Sir William Jones, and others, appear to have established the fact, that we find the ancestor of all the numerous tongues of the nations, not in the classic languages of Greece and Rome, nor in the more ancient Semitic, but in the speech of the Indo- European races, or Aryans. The Sanscrit possesses the root-affinities, and stands in a common relation to all the languages of the East on the one hand, and the West on the other. It presents its proud claim to be the parent of human tongues, and it identifies Iran as the spot whence the human family was spread abroad. “After thousands of years,” says Mr. Dasent, “the language and traditions of those who went East, and of those who went West, bear such an affinity to each other, as to have established, beyond discussion or dispute, the fact of their descent from a common stock.”

Let us next attend to the evidence, on the point before us, of the second witness, Mythology, or worship. The first form of worship- keeping out of view the one divinely appointed form- was Nature worship. By nature worship we mean the adoration of the Deity through an earthly symbol. The first symbol of the Creator was the sun, and consequently the earliest form of nature worship was sunworship. Where, and in what region of the earth was the first act of sun- worship performed? All are agreed that this form of worship took its rise in the same region to which philology has already conducted us and identified as the father- land of mankind. On the plains of Shinar rose the great tower or temple of Bel, or the Sun. There was the first outbreak of a worship which quickly spread over the earth, continually multiplying its rites, and varying its outward forms, becoming ever the more gorgeous but ever the more gross, but exhibiting in every land, and among all peoples, the same seminal characteristics and root-affinities which were embodied in the first act of sun- adoration on the Chaldean plain. Thus a second time we arrive on those great plains on which Ararat looks down.

There is a third witness, and the testimony of this witness is to the same effect with that of the former two. There exists a unique body of literature which is found floating in the languages of both the East and the West. It is mainly popular, consisting of traditions, fables, and tales, and is commonly styled folk- lore. These Tales bear the stamp of being the creation of a young race: they are bright with the colors of romance, and they embody, in the guise of allegory ; and fable, the maxims of an ancient wisdom.

Whether it is the Celtic or the Teutonic, the classic or the vernacular tongue, in which we hear these tales rehearsed, they are found to be the same. They have the same groundwork or plot though diffused over the globe. This points to a common origin, and in tracing them up to that origin we pass the tongues of modern Europe, we pass the Latin and (Greek tongues, we come to the language spoken by the Aryan races of Asia, and there we find the fountain- head of these unique and world- wide tales. Thus is another link )between the East and the West, between the peoples that beheld the “grey dawn” and those on whom the world’s “eve” is destined to descend. Such is the witness of these three- Philology, Religion, Tradition. They are the footprints which the human family have left on the road by which they have traveled; and following these traces we are led to Iran, where lived the men who were the first to “till and ear” the soil.

Thirty years ago it would have required some little courage to mention, unless to repudiate, the authority which we are about to cite. At that time it was fashionable to stand in doubt of the early traditions of all nations. The first chroniclers were believed to display a vein for legend rather than a genius for history. Lacking the critical acumen of the wise moderns, they were supposed to delight in garnishing their pages with prodigies and marvels, rather than storing them with ascertained facts. But this spirit of historic skepticism has since been markedly rebuked. The graven tablets dug up from the ruins of Nineveh, the treasures exhumed from the mounds of Babylon, and .the secrets of a bygone time with which the explorations on the plain of Troy have made us acquainted, have signally attested the veracity of the ,early writers, and shown us, that instead of indulging a love of fable, they exercised a scrupulous regard to fact, and an abstention from poetic adornment for which the world, in these latter days, had not given them credit. The consequence is that the early historians now speak with a justly enhanced authority. This remark is specially true of the sacred writers, and also, to a large extent, of the secular historians.

We in Great Britain likewise possess the records of an ancient time. These writings have been preserved, not in the dust of the earth, like the written cylinders and graven slabs of the Tigris and the Euphrates valley, but in the sacred repositories of the aboriginal race whose origin they profess to record. We refer to the “Welsh Triads.” These documents are the traditions received from the first settlers, handed down from father to son, and at last committed to writing by the Druids, the priests of the aborigines. They are arranged in groups, and each group consists of three analogous events; the design of this arrangement obviously being to simplify the narrative and aid the memory. We do not claim for them the authority of history; we use them solely as throwing a side light on the darkness of that remote age, and as confirmatory, or at least illustrative, as far as it is now possible to understand them, of the sketch we have ventured to trace of the peopling of Europe, and the first settling of Britain, from the etymological and historic proofs that remain to us.

The fourth Triad says: “There are three pillars of the nation of Britain. The first was Hu the Mighty, who brought the nation of the Kymry first to the isle of Britain; and they came from the summer country, which is called Defrobani (the shores of the Bosphorus), and they came over the Hazy Sea to the Isle of Britain, and to Armorica (Gaul) where they settled. The other two pillars of the nation of the Kymri were Prydain and Moelmud, who gave them laws, and established sovereignty among them.”

The fifth Triad says: “There were three social tribes of the Isle of Britain. The first was the tribe of the Kymry who came to the Isle of Britain with Hu the Mighty, because he would not possess a country and land by fighting and pursuit, but by justice and tranquillity. The second was the tribe of Lloegrians (the Loire) who came from Gascony; and they were descended from the primitive tribe of the Kymry. The third were the Brython, who came from Armorica, and who were descended from the primitive tribe of the Kymry, and they had all three the same language and speech.” This Triad offers a rough sketch of two migrations which are seen moving towards our island, each by a different route. The one comes over the Hazy Sea (most probably the German Ocean), and the other from Gaul across the channel. But both are sprung of the same stock, the Kymri, the descendants of Gomer that first peopled Europe.

The Triads go on to speak of two subsequent arrivals of settlers by whom the first great immigration into Britain was followed and supplemented. The two later immigrations were doubtless passed on to the remoter, and perhaps as yet, uninhabitated districts of our country. The first arrivals, it is natural to suppose, would plant themselves in the fertile and grassy plains of England, and would refuse, not without reason, to surrender to newcomers lands in which they had already established, by cultivation, the right of ownership. These last explorers would have to move onward and seek a settlement in the less hospitable and more mountainous regions of Scotland. Those whom we now see arriving in our island, and retiring to the straths and slopes of the Grampians, are probably the ancestors of the men who came afterwards to bear the name of Caledonians.

At what period the sons of Gomer- for their migration Claudian calls the ocean opposite the Rhine the Cimbric. The Duan, says Pinkerton, puts the Cumri as first possessors of only does it concern us to trace- took their departure from their original scats in the East, no history informs us. It is natural to suppose that before his death Noah gave to his sons no uncertain intimation of how he meant the earth to be parted amongst them, and the quarter of the globe in which they were to seek their several dwellings. As the great Patriarch of mankind he possessed the princedom of the world. This vast sovereignty he could not transmit entire. Like some great monarchs who have lived since his day, he must needs distribute his power among his successors; and in this he acted, we cannot doubt, in conformity with the intimations which had been made to him of the will of a yet greater monarch than himself. For we are told that “the Most High divided to the nations their inheritance.” But rivalships and conflicts would, not unlikely, spring up in connection with the distribution of so splendid a possession. Some might be unwilling to go forth into the unknown regions allotted to them, and instead of a long and doubtful journey, would prefer remaining near their original seat. The fruitful hills and well- watered vales of Armenia, and the broad plains of the Tigris and Euphrates, would not be easily forsaken for a climate less hospitable and an earth less bounteous. Noah would judge it expedient, doubtless, that while he was yet alive the three Septs into which his descendants were parted should begin their journey each in the direction of its allotted possession.

Ham must direct his steps toward his sandy continent on the West. Japhet must cross the mountains on the North, and seek a home for his posterity under skies less genial than those of Assyria. Shem must turn his face towards the burning plains of India. To leave their sheltered and now well-cultivated valley for unknown lands whose rugged soils they must begin by subduing, was a prospect far from inviting. The command to go forth seemed a hard one. They would lose the strength which union gives, and be scattered defenseless over the face of the earth. And if we read aright the brief record of Genesis, the mandate of heaven, delivered to mankind through their common Father, that they should disperse and settle the world, met with an open and organized resistance. They broke out into revolt, and in token thereof built their tower on the plain of Shinar. There is one name that stands out, bold and distinct, in the darkness, that hides all his contemporaries; that even of the leader in this rebellion. Nimrod saw in this strong aversion of the human kind to break up into tribes and disperse abroad, a sentiment on which he might rest his project of a universal monarchy. His plan was to keep the human family in one place, and accordingly he encouraged the rearing of this enormous structure, and he consecrated it to the worship of the Sun, or Bel. This tower on the plain of Shinar was meant to be the great temple of the world, the shrine at which the unbroken family of man should meet and perform their worship, and so realize their unity. The tower was the symbol of a double tyranny, that of political despotism and that of religious superstition. The policy of Nimrod was the same with that of many an autocrat since, who has found priestcraft the best ally of ambition, and concluded that the surest way to keep a people under his own .yoke was first to bend their necks to that of a false god. It was the policy adopted by Jeroboam in an age long posterior, when he set up his golden calves at Dan and Bethel, that the ten tribes might have no occasion to resort to Jerusalem to worship, and so be seduced back into their allegiance to the House of David.

This bold and impious attempt met with speedy and awful discomfiture. “The Lord came down,” says the inspired historian, using a form of speech which is commonly employed to indicate, not indeed a bodily or personal appearance on the scene, but all occurrence so altogether out of the ordinary course; a catastrophe so unlooked for, and so tremendous, that it is felt to be the work of Deity. We can imagine the lightenings and mighty tempests which accompanied the overthrow of this earliest of idolatrous temples, and center of what was meant to be a worldwide despotism. There was after this no need to repeat the patriarchal command to go forth. Pursued by strange terrors, men were in haste to flee from a region where the Almighty’s authority had been signally defied, and was now as signally vindicated. If Noah outlived this catastrophe, as he had survived all earlier and more awful one, he now beheld the insurrection against his patriarchal government quelled, and his posterity forced to go forth in three great bodies or colonies to seek the primeval forests and wildernesses of the world each its allotted home. We cannot be very wide of the mark if we fix the epoch of this great exodus it about the three hundredth year after the Flood.

The length of time occupied by the bands of Gomer in their journey from their starting- point to the shores of Britain would depend not so much on the space to be traversed, as on the incidents which might arise to facilitate or retard their journey. They had no pioneers to smooth their way, and they could have no chart to guide them over regions which they themselves were the first to explore. The speed of the single traveler, and even the caravan, is swift and uninterrupted; the movements of a million or two of emigrants are unwieldy and laborious. Their flocks and herds accompany them on their march. They had to cross innumerable rivers, passable only by extemporized bridges, or in canoes scooped hastily out of great oaks felled in the neighboring forest. They had to traverse swampy plains, hew their way through tangled woods, and struggle through narrow mountain defiles. A march of this sort must necessarily be slow. They made long halts, doubtless, in the more fertile. regions that lay on their route. In these spots they would practice a little husbandry, and exchange their nomadic habits for the pursuits of a more settled mode of life; and only, when the place became too narrow for their increasing numbers, would they send forth a new swarm to spy out the wilderness beyond, and find new habitations which would become in turn radiating points whence fresh streams might go forth to people the plains and mountains lying around their track. Their progress would exhibit the reverse picture of that presented by the army whose terrible march an inspired writer has so graphically described. The locust host of the prophet pursued its way, an Eden before it, a wilderness behind it. It was otherwise with the invading, but peaceful, millions, whose march we are contemplating. Wherever their footsteps passed the barren earth was turned into a garden. It was beauty, not blackness and burning, which lay behind them. They advanced to make war upon the desert only. The swampy pool and the black wood disappeared as they went on, and behind them on their track lay smiling fields and the habitations of men.

Forty years sufficed to carry the Goths from the banks of the Danube to the shores of the Atlantic. But their steps were quickened by their love of war and their thirst for plunder. No such incentives animated the emigrant horde whose march we are tracing, or urged on their advance. Their movement would bear not a little resemblance to what we see in America and Australia at this day, where there is a gradual but continuous outflow from the centers of population into the wilderness beyond, and the zone of desolation and silence is constantly receding before the face of man. Hundreds of year- we know not how many -would these early intruders into the silent wastes of the northern hemisphere occupy as they journeyed slowly onward and gave the first touch of cultivation to what is now, and has long been, the scene of fair kingdoms and flourishing cities. f8 The men whom we now see stepping upon our shores are shepherds and hunters. They had learned something. in their long journey, but they had forgotten more. That journey had not been conducive to their advance in knowledge, nor to their refinement in manners. The epithet “barbarian” was doubtless more applicable to them on their arrival at their new homes than when they took their departure from their original abodes. Whatever skill in husbandry’ and the arts they possessed in their native seats, would be diminished, if not well nigh lost in its transmission through successive generations in the course of their wandering and unsettled life. Their daily combats with the ruggedness of the earth, with the storms of the sky, or with the beast of prey, would brace their bodies and discipline their courage, but it would at the same time tend to roughen their manners, and impart a tinge of ferocity to their tempers and dispositions.

Counteractive influences, such as the modern emigrant from the old centers of civilization carries with him into the wilds of the southern or western world, they had none. We are accustomed to invest the shepherd’s life with the hues of poetry, and we people Arcadia with the virtues of simplicity and innocence, but when from this imaginary world we turn to the contemplation of real life we are rudely awakened from our dream. We are shocked to find brutality and cruelty where we had pictured to ourselves gentleness and love. It is the pasture grounds of Europe float have sent forth its fiercest warriors. Its nomadic tribes have been its most ruthless desolators. In proof of our assertion we might appeal to the portrait which Herodotus draws of the Scythians of his day; or to the ravaging hordes which issued from the banks of the Borysthenes, or of the Volga; or to the sanguinary halberdiers which in later times so often descended from the mountains of the Swiss to spread battle and carnage over the Austrian and Italian plains. The influences which molded these dwellers amid sheep- cots into warriors and plunderers would operate, though with greatly modified force, on the army of nomades which we see pursuing their way century after century, down the great slope which conducts from the highlands of Armenia, and the ranges of Caucasus, to the shores of the North Sea. They could hardly avoid catching the color of the savage scenes amid which their track lay. There are souls to which the gloom of the far- extending forest, the grandeur of the soaring peak, and the darkness of tim tempest impart a sentiment of elevation and refinement; but as regards the generality of mankind they are but little moved by the grandest of nature’s scenes, and are apt to become stern and hard as the rocks amid which they dwell.

The tendency of these injurious influences on the host whose movement we are tracing would be aggravated by other circumstances inseparable from their condition. They could carry with them no magazine of corn. Their daily food would be the flesh of their slaughtered herds, or of the animals caught in the chase. This is a species of diet, as physicians tell us, which is by no means fitted to cool the blood or allay the passions, but rather to inflame the irritability of both. Besides, this host was subjected to a natural process of weeding, in virtue of which only the hardiest and the most daring were sent onward. The less adventurous would remain behind at each halt to be transformed into tillers of the soil, or dressers of the vineyard, and this process of selection, repeated time alter time, would result at last in the creation of a race singularly robust in body and equally indomitable in spirit. And such, doubtless, were the physical and mental characteristics of that band of immigrants that ultimately stepped upon our shore. They were not like the Scythians of Herodotus, or the Goths of the Roman invasion, or the treacherous and cruel Arab of our own day. They were men occupied in the first great humanizing mission of subduing and cultivating the earth. Battle they had not seen all the way, if we except the contests they had to wage with the forces of nature. Blood they had not shed, save that of bullock or of beast of prey. But if their long journey had schooled them in the peaceable virtues of patience and endurance, it had engendered not less a keen relish for their wild freedom, and stalwart in frame and strong of heart, they were able and ready to defend the independence which had been theirs ever since the day that they rallied beneath the standard of their great progenitor, and contemning the double yoke of despotism and sun- worship which Nimrod had attempted to impose upon them, turned their faces toward the free lands of the North. f9

WE see these emigrants from the land of Armenia arriving on our shore, but the moment they pass within the confine of our island the curtain drops behind them, and for ages they are completely hidden from our view. What passed in our country during the centuries that elapsed between the period when it was taken possession of by the sons of Gomer and the advent of Caesar with his fleet, we can only dubiously conjecture.

As regards one important particular, we have tolerable grounds, we apprehend, for the conclusion we are now to state. These emigrants brought with them the essentials of Divine revelation. When they left their original dwelling, the world’s first Christianity, the Edenic to wit, had not been wholly obscured by the rising cloud of nature- worship. The first idolatrous temple had already been reared, and the earliest form of idolatrous worship, that of the sun ,and the heavenly bodies, had been instituted; but the dispersion which immediately followed had removed the Japhethian emigrants, whom we now see on their way to the fill’ north, from contact with the rites of the rising idolatry, and from those corrupting and darkening influences which acted powerfully, doubtless, on those who remained nearer the seat of the Nimrod instituted worship. Besides, the heads of this emigration had conversed with the men who had been in the ark with Noah, and stood beside the altar whereon the Common Father offered his first sacrifice to Jehovah after the flood. It is not conceivable that Japhet had joined in the rebellion of Nimrod, or ever worshipped in the great temple on Shinar. From Japhet they had learned the knowledge of the one true God, and the promise of a Redeemer, who was to appear in after ages, and in some not yet clearly understood way, though dimly foreshadowed in the victim on the Patriarchal Altar, was to accomplish a great deliverance for the race. This great Tradition would journey with them, and some rays of the primeval day would shine on the remote shores of Britain. We have been taught to picture the earliest condition of our country as one of unbroken darkness. A calm consideration of the time and circumstances of its first peopling warrants a more cheerful view. Believing in a God, invisible and eternal, and knowing that He heareth those in every land who pray unto Him, who can tell how many “devout fearers” of ‘His name there may have been among the first inhabitants of our country? How many lives may this knowledge have. purified, and how many death- beds may it have brightened! The Patriarchs themselves had not much more than was possessed by those whom we behold setting ,out towards our distant shore.

Our idea that the earliest ages of all nations were the purest, and that as time passed on mankind receded ever the farther from the knowledge of the true God and sank ever the deeper into idolatry, is corroborated by the fact that the oldest known Egyptian manuscript, and of course the oldest known manuscript in the world, contains no traces of idolatry, and does not mention the name of one Egyptian god. f10

These settlers found the climate of their new country more temperate- its summers less hot, and its winters less cold- than that of the continental lands over which they had passed on their way thither. Its plains wore a covering of luxuriant grass, and afforded ample pasturage for their flocks and herds. Forests covered the mountain sides, and in places not a few stretched down into the valleys and straths. These would furnish in abundance materials for the construction of dwellings, one of the first requisites of the emigrant. The new- comers go about this task in the following wise. They clear a space in the forest, or on the jungly plain, felling the trees with a stone hatchet. On the open area they plant stakes of timber, intertwine them with wattles, and roof them with straw. There rises a little cluster of huts. A wall of palisades is run around the hamlet to defend it from the beast of prey, for, as yet, human foe they have none to dread.

In at least one instance, if we mistake not, we come upon the traces of these aboriginal settlers, and the memorials, disclosed after so long an interval, touchingly attest the truth of the picture we have drawn. The relics in question occur as far north as Loch Etive, Argyleshire. Under a black peat moss, on the banks of the loch just named, are found, here and there, patches of stone pavement of an oval form. These pavements, on being dug down to, are found strewed over with wood- ashes, the remains of fires long since extinguished; and around them lie portions of decayed hazel stakes, the relics of the palisading that once formed the defenses of the encampment. Here stood a cluster of log huts, and at a period so remote that the moss that now covers the site to a depth of eight feet has had time to grow above it. f11 It is touching to think that in these memorials we behold the oldest known “hearths” in Scotland. We picture to ourselves the forms that sat around their fires. They may not have been just the savages we are so apt to fancy them. They had their joys and their sorrows as we at this day have ours. The human heart is the same whether it beats under a garment of ox- hide or under a vesture of fine linen. It ever goes back into the past, or forward into the future, in quest of the elements of hope and happiness. These settlers cherished, doubtless, as their most precious treasure, the traditions which their fathers had brought with them from their far- off early home. They will not let them die even in this rude land. And when the winter draws on, and the storm lowers dark on the hill, and the winds roar in the fir wood, or lash into fury the waters of the lake, beside which they have raised their huts, the inmates gather in a circle round their blazing hearth, and the patriarch of the dwelling rehearses to ears attent the traditions of an early day and a distant land. Tales of the flood and of the ark, who knows, may here have had their eloquent reciters and their absorbed listeners. The “glorious hopes” carried to our island by the first pilgrim settlers would be clung to by their descendants. The knowledge of them alone kept their head above the darkness. To part with them was to obliterate by far the brightest traces by which to track their past. But gradually, veiled in legend, or disfigured and darkened by fable, these “hopes” died out, or, rather, were crystallized in the ritual of the Druid.

The sons of Gomer, who erected these frail structures on the shores of Loch Etive, were probably coeval with the sons of Ham, who were the first builders of the pyramids on thebanks of the Nile. The monuments of the workers in granite, thanks to the durability of the material, still remain to us. The perishable edifices of the workers in wattle and sod have also been preserved by the kindly moss which, growing with the centuries, at last covered them up for the benefit of future ages. We can now compare them with the huts in which their brethren of the Gomer race, on the other side of the German Ocean, were found still living, in times not so very remote. Simple, indeed, in both style and material, was the architecture of these Cymric houses, whether on German plain or on Scottish moor. A circular row of wooden piles formed their wall. The roof was of straw; a fire was kindled on the stone floor, and the smoke made its escape by an opening left for that purpose in the center of the roof.

The habits of the inmates were simple. They were compelled to accommodate their life to the conditions of the country i~ which they found themselves. A humid atmosphere, the necessary accompaniment of a Swampy soil, would darken the sky with a frequent haze, and diminish the sun’s power to ripen the grain. Corn they did not grow. Their long devotion to the shepherd’s life had made them unfamiliar with the art of tillage. What of the husbandman’s skill they had known and practised in their ancestral homes had been unlearned on their long journey. It hardly matters, for their wants are supplied by the milk of their flocks, by the game in which their forests abound, and the fish with which their rivers are stocked, which they spear with sharpened stakes. Their hardihood is maintained by the daily combats in which they are compelled to engage with the beasts of prey. The weapons with which they do battle against these depredators of their herds, and, at times, assailants of their villages, are simple indeed. The club, the stone hatchet, the bow, the spear tipped with flint or bone, the snare, the sling, are the instruments they wield, being the only ones then known to them.

Invention sleeps when the wants of man are few. Necessity rouses the dormant faculties, and impels to the cultivation of the arts, slow and tardy at the best. It is easier transforming the shepherd into ~t warrior than training him into an artisan; the wild freedom of the hills is not easily cast off for the minute diligence and close application of the workshop. Yet were there handicrafts which these pilgrim- shepherds were compelled to learn. We find them expert at canoe- building. They had had frequent occasion to practice this art on their long journey, and the friths and lakes of their new home were too numerous to permit their skill in this important department to rust. New needs as they arise prompt to new devices. A tent may suffice as a dwelling on the plains of Asia, but not on the bleak Caledonian moor. The inhabitants of the latter must dig a chamber in the earth, or erect a hut above ground of dry sods, or of unhewn stones, would they protect themselves from the rains and frost. Garments of some sort they must needs have; for though some historians have portrayed the Caledonian as running nude on his mountains, or covering his person with paint instead of raiment, we submit that this was incompatible with existence amid the snow and ice of a Scottish winter. A succession of rigorous seasons, such as are incident to our high latitude, would have wound up the drama of the race before it had well begun, and instead of flourishing in stalwart figure for centuries, the Caledonian would have perished from the land, and left it ,is desolate and silent as when he first set foot on it. It is the historian, we suspect, who has painted.

If the Caledonian dispensed with clothing, it was only at times. He stripped himself that he might give greater agility to his limbs when he chased the roe, or greater terror to his visage when he grappled with his enemy in battle; or he disencumbered himself to wade his marshes and swim his rivers. Raiment he not only needed, but raiment of ~ very substantial kind. The hoar frosts of Caledonia were so famous as to be heard of at Rome, and the light fabrics woven on the looms of later days would have afforded but small protection from the hairs and icy blasts of the then Scotland.

The skin of sheep or the hide of ox formed a substantial and comfortable garment for the native. This was his winter covering. The stitching of it together taught him a little tailoring. He used a needle of bone with a sinew for a thread. His summer robe was lighter, and, moreover, admitted of a little gaiety in the way of color, which would bring out in bright relief the figure of the wearer as he was seen moving athwart brown moor or blue hill. This was fabricated from the wool of his flock or the hair of his goats. The manufacture of these homely stuffs initiated the Caledonian into the useful arts of carding, spinning, and weaving.

The aboriginal dwellings merit a more particular description. They are commonly known by the name of weems. These weems have been discovered in groups in almost every county of Scotland, more particularly in Aberdeenshire, in Buchan, in Forfarshire, and even in the wildest districts of the Highlands. They are nearly as common as the sepulchral cairn. Generally the surface of the ground gives no clue to the existence of these underground dwellings. The moor or heath looks perfectly level and unbroken, and the traveler may pass and repass a hundred times without once suspecting that underneath his feet are houses that were constructed thousands of years ago, still containing the implements and utensils of the men who lived in them- the quernes in which they ground their corn, the bones and horns of the animals they hunted, the relics of their meal, and the ashes of the fire on which they cooked it.

These weems in their construction show both ingenuity and labor. Those found in Aberdeenshire are built of blocks of granite more than six feet long. They vary, of course, in their details, but the general style and structure are alike in all of them. Some of these subterranean abodes arc upwards of thirty feet long, and from eight to nine feet wide. The walls converge as they rise, and the roof is formed in the same way as in the cyclopean edifices of early Greece and the colossal temples of Mexico and Yucatan, whose builders would appear to have been ignorant of the principle of the arch. The great slabs have been made to overlap each other; the intervening space is reduced at each successive row, and at last the opening a- top is so narrowed as to be covered in by a single block, and the vault completed. Not unfrequently small side chambers are attached to the main chamber. These are entered by passages not above three feet in height, and as a proof of the inefficiency of the tools with which these primitive builders worked, the stones in the wall longing the partition between the two chambers, though placed flush in the side which presents itself to the great chamber, project their narrow ends in the side turned to the small apartment. The workmen evidently lacked metal tools to dress and smooth the stones. If one may judge from the indications in the case of the best preserved of these weems, the doorway was formed of two upright slabs; the width between being sufficient for the occupant to glide in, and by a slanting passage find his way to the chamber below. It was in many cases the only opening, and served the purpose of door, window, and chimney all in one. In some instances, however, a small aperture is found at the farther end, which might give egress to the smoke, or permit the entrance of a little light. f12 On the approach of an enemy, the entire population of a district would make a rush to these narrow apertures, and vanish as quickly and noiselessly as if the earth had swallowed them up, or they had melted into thin air, leaving the intruder partly amazed and partly amazed by their sudden and complete disappearance.

These underground massy halls were the winter abodes of their builders. Once safely below, a little fire to dispel the darkness, their larder replenished from the spoils of the chase or the produce of the flock, they would make a shift to get through the long months, and would not be greatly incommoded by the fiercest storms that raged above ground. But we can imagine how glad and joyous the occupants would be when the winter drew to a close, and spring filled the air with its sweetness, and the beauty of the first green was seen on strath and wood, and the early floweret looked forth, to exchange these dreary vaults in the earth for the huts above ground, built of turf and the branches of trees, in which they were wont to pass the warm days of their brief summer.

When at last, after centuries had passed by, the Phoenician navigator, penetrating the recesses of the North Sea, moored his bark beneath the white cliffs of Albion, or under the dark rocks of Caledonia, the ingenuity and resource of the natives were quickened afresh. The Invention of the Caledonian was set to work to create new forms of art which might tempt the distant trader to re- visit his barbarous shore. New artistic designs, some of them of rare ingenuity and exquisite beauty, arose in an after- age on our soil, all of them nativeto the land. Shut in by their four seas, these early artists had no foreign models to copy from. Nevertheless, though they had studied in no school of design, and despite the farther disadvantage under which they labored of being but ill- served by the tools with which they worked, the products of their home- born art surprise and delight us by their purity, their ingenuity, their elegance, and the finish of the workmanship. More graceful designs were not to have been seen in the famous studios of Phoenicia, or even in the more celebrated workshops of Greece.

As their numbers grew other necessities dawned upon them. The pilgrim-bond, so strong when they arrived in the country, now began to be relaxed and to lose its hold. They felt the need of laws and of a stronger authority than the Parental to govern them. First came the chief, whose rule extended over a tribe. When quarrels broke out between tribe and tribe, a higher authority still- a chief of chiefs- was felt to be needed for the government of the community, and the administration of the laws. Now came the king. This brings us to that long procession of august personages which Fordoun and Boethius make to defile past us, and which they dignify with the title of monarchs. These fir- off and dimly- seen potentates may not be mere shadows after all; they may have had an actual existence, and exercised a rude sovereignty in those obscure times; but it does not concern us to establish their historic identity, and celebrate over again the glory of those valorous and worthy exploits which they have been made to perform on the battle- field, and which, doubtless, if ever they were achieved, received due laud from the age in which they were done.

LET us come closer to these British aborigines. They have no knowledge of letters. They had set out from their original homes before the invention of the alphabet. They have brought with them the implements of the shepherd and of the hunter, and in the foresight of danger they have provided themselves with some rude weapons of defense, such as the club and the stone hatchet, but they are wholly ignorant of the art of conversing with posterity, and of communicating to the ages to come a knowledge of what they were, and what they did. This parts them from our ken even more completely than the wild sea around their island sundered them from their contemporaries, and it may seem bootless, therefore, to pursue them into the thick darkness into which they have passed. And yet the labor of such inquiry will not be altogether thrown away. These ancient men have left behind them traces which enable us to reproduce, in outline, the manner of life which they led, much as the Arab of the desert can tell from the footprints of the traveler on the sand to what tribe he belonged, whether he carried a burden, and the days or weeks that have elapsed since he passed that way. The characters which we are now to essay to read are inscribed on no page of book, they are written on the soil of the country; nevertheless, they bear sure testimony regarding the men to whom they belong, and the study of them will disclose to us something, at least, of what went on in our dark land before history arrived with her torch to dispel its night.

We begin with the stone age. We know not when this age opened or when it closed, and it is bootless to inquire. Viewing the matter generally, the stone age was coeval with man. All around him were the stones of the field. They were his natural weapons, especially of attack, and he must have continued to make use of them till he came into possession of a better material for the fabrication of his implements and tools. This was not till the arrival of bronze, a date which it is impossible to fix. These great discoveries were made before history had begun to note the steps of human progress, and therefore we are here able to speak not of time but of sequences. We are not, however, to conclude that all nations began their career with the stone age. There was one family of mankind which retained the traditional knowledge of the metals, but the colateral branches of that family, when they wandered away from their original seat, lost the art of extracting and smelting the ore, and had to begin their upward career on the low level of the stone age. Let us hear what archeology has to say of our country on this head.

On yonder moor is a cairn. It was there at the dawn of history; how long before we do not know. It has seen, probably, as many centuries as have passed over the pyramids. Its simplicity of structure has fitted it even better to withstand the tear and wear of the elements than those mountainous masses which still rear their hoar forms in the valley of the Nile; and it has more sacredly guarded the treasures committed to its keeping than have the proud mausolea of the Pharaohs. Let us open it, and see whether it does not contain some record of a long forgotten past. We dig down into it, and light upon a stone coffin. We open the lid of the rude sarcophagus. There, resting in the same grave in which weeping warriors laid him four thousand or more years ago, is the skeleton of one who was, doubtless, of note and rank in his day. We can imagine the blows that great arm- bone would deal when it was clothed with sinew and flesh, and the fate that would await the luckless antagonist who should encounter its owner on the battlefield. This ancient sleeper, whom we have so rudely disturbed in his dark chamber, may have surpassed in stature and strength the average Caledonian of his day, f13 but even granting this, he enables us to guess the physical endowments of a race which could send forth such stalwart, if exceptional, specimens to assist in clearing the forest or subduing the rugged glebe, or fighting the battles of clan or of country.

We open this coffin as we would a book, and we scan its contents with the same engrossing interest with which we devour the printed volume which tells of some newly discovered and far- off country. But we have not yet read all that is written in this ancient tome. We turn to its next page. The weapons of the warrior have been interred in the same rude cist with himself. Here, lying by his side, is his stone battle- axe. Its once tough wooden handle is now only a bit of rotten timber. On its stone head, however, time has been able to effect no change: it is compact and hard as when last carried into battle. This stone axe is a silent but significant witness touching the age in which its owner lived. No one would have gone into battle armed only with an implement of stone if he could have provided himself with a weapon of iron, or of other metal. But weapon of iron the occupant of this cist had none. He fought as best he could with such weapons as his age supplied him with, making strength of arm, doubtless, compensate for what was lacking in his weapon. The inference is clear. There was an age when iron was unknown in Scotland, and when implements of all kinds were made of stone.

There is a close resemblance betwixt the battle- axes dug out of the cairns and tumuli of our country and those fabricated by the savages of the South Sea Islands not longer ago than a little prior to the last age. It is not necessary that we should suppose that the latter worked upon the models furnished by our ancestors of savage times. The constructive powers of man in a savage state are always found working in the same rugged groove, and hence the resemblance between the two though parted by thousands of years. All his implements, peaceful and warlike, did man then fabricate of stone. With an axe of stone he cut down the oak; with an axe of stone he hollowed out the canoe; with an axe of stone he drove into the ground the stakes of his rude habitation; with an axe of stone he slaughtered the ox on which he was to feast; and with an axe of stone he laid low his enemy on the battle- field, or himself bit the dust by a blow from the same weapon. It was the STONE AGE, the first march on the road to civilization.

The harder stones were used in the fabrication of the heavier instruments. It was of no use going into battle with a weapon which would fly in splinters after dealing a few blows. The stone used in the manufacture of the battle axe was that known as green- stone. But the lighter weapons, and in particular the projectiles, were fashioned out of flint. A mass of flint was split up in flakes, the flakes were chipped into the form of arrowheads, and were fitted on to a cane, and made fast by a ribbon of skin. These flint arrow- heads proved rather formidable missiles. Shot by a strong hand from a well- strung bow, they brought down the roe as he bounded through the forest, or laid the warrior prostrate on the field. These flints were capable of receiving an edge of great sharpness. Flint knives were made use of by both the Hebrews and the Egyptians in their religious rites, in those especially where a clean incision had to be made, as in the process of embalming and other ceremonies. The hieroglyphics on the Egyptian obelisks are supposed to have been cut by flint knives. The granite in which the hieroglyphics were graven is too hard to have been operated upon by bronze or iron, and the Egyptians were not acquainted with steel.

These arrow- heads buried in the soil are often turned up at this day in dozens by the Spade or the plough, showing how prevalent was their use in early times, and for a very considerable period. They suggest curious thoughts touching the artists that so deftly shaped them, and the men who turned them to so good account in the chase or in the fight. Were these ancient warriors to look up from their cairns and stone cists, how astonished would they be to mark the difference betwixt their simple missiles and the formidable projectiles- the breech- loaders, the guns, the mortars, and various artillery- with which the moderns decide their quarrels.

In some localities these flints are gathered in a heap, as if they had fallen in a shower, and lay as they fell till the plough uncovered them. This accumulation of weapons tells a tale of forgotten warfare. When we dig in the moor of Culloden, or in the field of Waterloo, and exhume the broken shells, the round shot, the swords, and other memorials of battle which so plentifully exist in these soils, we say, and would say, though no record existed of the carnage formerly enacted on the spot, here armies must have met, and here furious battle must have been waged. And so, when we gaze on these long- buried flints laid bare by the plough, we are forcibly carried back to a day in our country’s unrecorded past, when uncouth warriors, with matted locks, painted limbs, and eyes gleaming with the fire of battle, gathered here to decide some weighty point of tribal dissension, and awaken the echoes of the lonely hills with their wild war- whoop, and the crash of their stone axes.

Let us look a moment with the eyes of these men, and view the world as it was seen by them. What a narrow horizon begirt them all round! History had never unrolled to their eye her storied page, and beyond the genealogy of their chief, which they had heard their senachies rehearse, they knew little of what had happened in the world till they themselves came into it. In front they were shut in by a near and thick darkness. The moor on which they dwelt was their world. The chase or the battle was the business of their lives; and to die at last by the side of their chieftain in some great tribal conflict, and have their bones inurned in the same sepulchral mound, was the supreme object of their ambition. Their range of knowledge and enjoyment was only a little less contracted than that of the beasts that perish. What a change when knowledge lit her lamp, and the barbarian, loosed from the handbreadth of earth to which he had been chained, could make the circuit of the globe, and the circuit of the centuries, and draw the elements of his happiness from all the realms of space, and from all the ages of time!

Let us ascend an eminence and take a survey of the landscape of this age. It looks to the eye a vast shaggy wood, crossed by sedgy rivers, dotted by black tarns, and broken by rocky cliffs and ridges. Here and there a gleam of gold tells where a patch of grain is ripening, and the ascending wreath of blue smoke reveals the wattle- worked homestead that nestles in the forest. We visit one of these clearings. We find the hamlet within its staked enclosure. The inhabitants, some in linen, for they grow a little flax, others in skins, are variously occupied. Some are cutting wood with stone axes of wonderful sharpness, or sawing it with pieces of notched flint, or splitting it up by means of a stone wedge. Others are fabricating spear- shafts, arrowheads, or scraping skins, or polishing celts, or carving implements out of bone and antler. Outside the huts the women are grinding the corn with pestle and mortar- for the hand quern has not yet been invented- and cooking the meal on the fire, or they are spinning thread with spindle and distaff, to be woven into cloth on a rude loom. Perchance some are engaged moulding with the hand vessels of clay. It is verily but the infancy of the arts, but we here behold the foundation on which have been built the mighty industries that now occupy our populations.

Outside the stockade that runs round the hamlet are flocks of sheep, herds of goats, troops of horses, and droves of short- horned cattle. Numerous hogs scour the clearing in search of roots, tended by swine herds and defended by large dogs against the bears, wolves, and foxes that infest the forest that forms the environment of the homestead. f14 Such is the picture the clearing presents.

THE tail, fair- haired, round- headed Celt brought the knowledge of bronze with him into Britain. Man made a vast stride when he passed from stone to metal. With that transition came an instant and rapid advance all along the line of civilization. The art of war was the first to feel “the quickening influence of the new instrument with which man was now armed. His weapons were no longer of stone but of bronze; and although this is every way an inferior metal to that by which it was to be succeeded, iron, to wit, it was immeasurably superior to stone, and accordingly victory remained with the warrior who entered the field armed with sword, and axe, and dagger, all of bronze. This wrought a revolution in the military art not unlike that which the invention of gunpowder in an after- age brought with it.

When we speak of the Celts, and the gift they conferred on the nations of the West, let us pause a moment to note their origin and career. They are known in history by three names- the Celtae, the Galatae, and the Galli. Their irruption from their primeval home in Central Asia was the terror of the age in which it took place. In the fourth century before Christ, after some considerable halt, they resumed their migration westwards in overwhelming numbers and resistless force. They scaled the barrier of the Alps, rushed down on Italy, gave the towns of Etruria to sack, defeated the Roman armies in battle, and pursued their victorious march to the gates of Rome, where they butchered the senators in the Capitol, and had well nigh strangled the Great Republic in its infancy. Another division of these slaughtering and marauding hordes took the direction of Greece, and threatened to overcloud with their barbarism that renowned seat of Philosophy and Art. It was with the utmost difficulty that they were repulsed, and Athens saved. The legions of the first Caesar, after nine bloody campaigns, broke the strength of the Galli; but it was not till the days of the second Caesar that all danger from them was past, and that Rome could breathe freely.

This is the first appearance of the Celts in history; but it is undoubted that long before this, at a period of unknown antiquity, they had begun to migrate from the East, and to mingle largely with the Cimmeric nations which had preceded them in their march westwards. The whole of Europe, from the border of Scythia to the Pillars of Hercules, was known to Herodotus as the Land of the Celts.

Their sudden and furious descent on Italy and Greece was probably owing to the pressure of some other people, Scythic or Teutonic, that began to act upon them, putting them again in motion, and sending them surging over the great mountains that flanked their westward march. Their prolific swarms largely mixed themselves with the Iberians of Spain, the Cimri around the German Ocean, and the aborigines of Britain, and generally formed the great bulk of the population west of the Rhine and the Alps.

They were a pastoral people. To till the ground they held a mean occupation, and one that was below the dignity of a Celt. But if they disdained or neglected the plough, they knew how to wield the sword. They were fierce warriors. Even Sallust confesses that they bore off the prize from the Romans themselves in feats of arms. Compared with the legions, they were but poorly equipped- an ill- tempered sword, a dagger, and a lance were their weapons- though they far excelled the Britons, whom they found, when they first came into contact with them, doing their fighting with weapons of stone. They delighted in garments of showy colors, which they not unfrequently threw off widen they engaged in combat. The character of the Celts was strangely and most antithetically mixed. It presented a combination of the best and the worst qualities. They were eager to learn, they were quick of apprehension, they were very impressible, they were impulsive and impetuous, but they were unstable, lacking in perseverance, easily discouraged by reverses, and it was their ill fortune to mar their greatest enterprises by the discords and quarrels into which they were continually falling among themselves. The picture drawn of them by Cato the censor has been true of them in all ages of their history. “Gaul, for the most part,” said he, “pursues two things most perseveringly- war and talking cleaverly.” f15

Such were the people who brought the knowledge of bronze into Britain. Hewing their way through a population armed only with implements of stone, the intruders taught the Caledonian by dear experience to avail himself of the advantage offered by the new material. This was the first fruit that grew out of their invasion. But the Celts were destined to render, in an after- age, a far higher service to the nations of the West than any we see them performing on occasion of their first appearance in Europe. Only they had first to undergo other vicissitudes and migrations. They had to be dislodged from great part of that vast European area of which they had held for a while exclusive possession.

They must flee before the sword with which they had chased others: they must be parted into separate bodies, shifted about and driven into corners; they must, in particular, mingle their blood with that of the Caledonian and the Scot, imparting to these races something of their own fire, and receiving back something of the strength and resoluteness of these other. The faith which they had left behind them in their Aryan home, then only in the simplicity of its early dawn, will break upon them in the West, in the full, clear light of Christianity; this will open to them new channels for their activities and energies, and then they will crown themselves with nobler victories than they have won heretofore. Instead of unsettling kingdoms by the sword, it will now be their only ambition to build them up by diffusing amongst them the light of knowledge, the benefits of art, and the blessings of Christianity. There awaits the Celts in the future, as we shall see at a subsequent stage of our History, the glorious task of leading in the evangelization of the West.

But this is an event as yet far distant, and we return to our task of tracing, as dimly recorded in our sepulchral barrows and cairns, the changes in our national life consequent on the introduction of bronze. The first of man’s pursuits to feel the influence of the new metal was war, as we have said. And, accordingly, when we open the cists and cairns of that ancient world, there is the sword, and there are the other instruments of battle, all of bronze. Yet in its evolutions and applications, bronze was found to benefit the arts of peace even more than it quickened the work of human slaughter. The art of shipbuilding took a stride. From earliest time man had sailed the seas, at least he had crept along their shores, but in how humble a craft! a boat of wicker work, covered with skin, or a canoe hollowed, by means of fire or a stone hatchet, out of a single trunk; but now he begins to cross frith and loch in a boat built of plank His vessels, though still diminutive, are now more sea- worthy. He can more safely extend his voyages. He can cross the narrow seas around his island, carrying with him, mayhap, a few of the products of his soil, which perchance his neighbors may need, and which he exchanges in barter for such things as his own country does not produce. Thus the tides of commerce begin to circulate, though as yet their pulse is feeble and slow.

There is an advance, too, in the art of house- building. A chamber in the earth, or a hut of turf and twigs above .ground, had heretofore contented the Caledonian, who bravely met with hardihood and endurance the inclemencies which he knew not otherwise to master. Now in the bronze age, he erects for himself a dwelling of stone. His habitation as yet can boast of no architectural grace, for his tools are still imperfect, and his masonry is of the rudest type; but his ingenuity and labor make up for what is lacking in his art or in his implements, and now his hut of wattles is forsaken for a stone house, and his stronghold underneath the ground is exchanged for strengths, or castles of dry stone, exceedingly somber in their exterior, but cunningly planned within, which now began to dot the face of the country.

A further consequence of the introduction of bronze was the developement of a taste for personal ornament. The love of finery is an instinct operative even in the savage. Our ancestors of unrecorded time were not without this passion, or the means of gratifying it. The beauties of those days rejoiced their bead necklaces and bracelets. These were formed of various materials- bone, horn, jet, the finer sort of stones, and frequently of seashells, perforated, and strung upon a sinew or vegetable fiber. Beads of glass have in some instances been discovered in the cists and tumuli of the stone period, the importation probably of some wandering trader, from the far- off shore of Phoenicia. But when we come to the cists of the bronze age, we find them more amply replenished with articles of personal ornament than those of the foregoing period. These, moreover, are of costlier material, and, as we should expect, they are more elegant in form, and more skillful in workmanship. As among the ancients so with the primitive Britons, neckornaments seem to have been the most highly prized; for collars abound among the treasures of the cist. The other members of the body had their due share, however. These were pendants for the ears, clasps for the arms, rings for the finger, and anklets for the legs. Nor was this love of ornament confined to the females of the period. As is the case among all savage nations, it was hardly less strongly developed among the gentlemen of Caledonia than among the ladies. The archeologist finds not unfrequently in the cist of the chieftain and warrior, lying alongside his skeleton, the ornaments which graced his person, as well as the sword and spear that served him in the battle. Among female ornaments, necklaces have been discovered, consisting of alternate beads of jet and amber. The native origin of these articles is placed beyond doubt by the fact that they totally differ from the Anglo- Roman or classic remains, and that they are found in the earliest tombs, dug long ere foot of Roman had touched the soil.

A yet greater obligation did Scottish civilization owe to bronze when it introduced, as it now did, a superior and more serviceable class of domestic utensils. Hitherto culinary vessels and table- dishes had been of stone or clay rudely fashioned. These would fall into disuse on the advent of bronze. The natives had now access to a material of which to fashion vessels, possessing not only greater durability, but susceptible also of greater variety of form and greater grace of decoration. The articles of bronze- cups, tripods, kettles, and cauldrons- dug up from underneath our mosses, show that the Caledonian was not slow to appreciate the advantages which bronze put within his reach, that he set himself to acquire the art of working in it, and that he succeeded in producing utensils of greater utility and of superior beauty to any that he or his fathers had known. His table had a grace which had been absent from it till now. He felt pardonable pride, doubtless, as he beheld it garnished with vessels of precious material and curious workmanship. king might sit at his board. Nor did the matter end there. The art refined the artificer. The Caledonian workman came under the humanising influence of a sense of beauty. As time went on his genius expanded, and the deftness of his hand increased. Every new creation of symmetry or of grace as it unfolded itself under his eye gave him new inspiration, and not only prompted the desire, but imparted the ability to surpass all his former efforts by something better still- some yet rarer pattern, some yet lovelier form. Thus grew up the Celtic art. The time of its efflorescence was not yet come- was far distant. But when at length that period arrives, and Celtic art is perfected, it is found to challenge a place all its own among the arts of the world. From the simplest elements it evolved effects of the most exquisite grace and beauty. It was unique. Celtic hands only knew to create it, and on none but Celtic soil did it flourish.

It is natural to suppose that for some time after the introduction of bronze the supply of the metal was limited, and its cost correspondingly high. In these circumstances vessels of stone and clay would continue some little time in use, along with those of the new manufacture. The finds in the bogs and cists of our country verify this conjecture. The two kinds of vessels are found in bogs and pits in miscellaneous heaps, showing that the worker in clay and stone was not instantaneously superseded by the worker in bronze. Not only did his occupation continue, but from this time Iris art was vastly improved. He profited, doubtless, by the metallic patterns to which he had now access, and he learned to impart to his stone arts and implements something of the symmetry and grace which characterized the new creations in bronze. It is now that we come on traces of the potter’s wheel; as later on of the turning lathe. The clay vessels of the period are no longer molded rudely by the hand, they have a regularity and elegance of shape which the hand could not bestow, and which must have been given them by machinery. This is particularly the case as regards the cinery vases, which are found in the cists and cairns of the bronze period: many of them are specially graceful. The appearance of urns containing the ashes of the dead in this age, and not till this age, is significant as betokening the entrance of a new race and of new customs, if not of new beliefs. The inhumation of the body was, beyond doubt, the earliest mode of sculpture in our country. Its first inhabitants had brought tiffs custom with them from their eastern home, and continued to practice and, accordingly, in the very oldest cairns and cists the skeleton is found laid out at its full length, and one consequence of its long entombment is that on the opening of ‘the cist, and the admission of air, the bones fall in dust and the skeleton disappears under the gaze. But in the bronze age there is a change: this most ancient and patriarchal method of burial is discontinued. The presence of the cinery was in the grave shows that the body was first burned, and then the ashes were collected and put into an urn. This treatment of the dead has classic example to recommend it. Every one knows that the Greeks and Romans placed the bodies of their departed warriors and philosophers on the funeral pyre. Homer has grandly sung the burning of the bodies of Hector and Patroclus on the plain of Troy: the kindling of the pile over- night, the quenching of the flames at dawn with libations of wine, and the raising over the inurned ashes of the deceased heroes that mighty tumulus that still attracts the gaze of the traveler as he voyages along that shore. But despite the halo which these high classic examples throw around the funeral pyre, we revolt from it. It shocks the reverence which clings even to the bodies of those whom we have revered and loved while they were alive. From these grand obsequies on the Trojan plain we turn with a feeling of relief to the simple yet dignified scene in the Palestinian vale, where the Hebrew Patriarch is seen following his dead to hide it out of his sight in the chambers of the earth. This mode of sepulture, that is, by incremation, would seem to have been only temporary. When we come later down the cinery urns ,disappear from the graves, and we are permitted to conclude that the Caledonians ceased to light the funeral pyre, and reverted ill their disposal of their dead to the more ancient and certainly more seemly rite of laying them in the earth. f16

With bronze, too, came a marked improvement on the dress of the natives. Their clothing hitherto had alternated betwixt a coat of fur, which was worn in winter, and a garment of linen, which formed their summer attire. The former cost them little trouble, save what it took to hunt the boar or other beast of prey and compel him to give up his skin for the use of his captor. The latter they wove from the little flax which they had learned to cultivate. But they needed a stuff more suitable for clothing in a moist and variable climate than either the hide of ox or the light fabric of linen. A woolen garment was what they wanted as intermediate betwixt one of fur and one of flax. But in the stone age it does not appear that they knew to weave wool into cloth. Probably their implements were at fault. But the arrival of bronze got them over the difficulty. It supplied them with finer tools, and now an advance takes place in the arts of spiraling and weaving. They had now less need to rob the bear of his skin, or slaughter the Ox for his hide. The wool of their flocks would furnish a garment more suitable for most purposes than even these. Accordingly, woolen cloth now begins to make its appearance. And from this time we can imagine the Caledonian, when he went afield, wrapping himself in his woolen plaid, or donning his woolen cloak and cap, while his legs are encased in leather, and his feet are thrust in- to sandals of skin. But it is in the agriculture of the country that the main change that followed the introduction of bronze is seen. The stone axe, with its edge so easily blunted, made the process of clearing the forest a slow and laborious one. The oaks and firs that covered Scotland yielded to the axe only after long and painful blows, and it was with immense toil that a small patch was redeemed for pasture, or for growing a little grain. In truth, the clearances were mostly effected by the agency of fire. But when bronze made its appearance the Caledonian became master of the great forests that environed and hemmed him in. His pasturages stretched out wider and wider; the golden grain was seen where the dark wood had waved. The beasts of prey decreased, their covert being cut down. If the hunter had now less scope for the exercise of the chase, and his venison began in consequence to grow scarce, he could make up for the lack of that food in which he delights by a freer use of the flesh of his flocks and herds. There came to be no lack of corn and milk; and the morasses beginning to be drained, not only was the face of the country beautified, but the air above it became drier and more salubrious. Such is the evidence furnished by the contents of the refuse- heaps of the bronze age, found in caves, in barrows, in lake- dwellings, and in ancient burial- places. f17

It is the admixture of tin with copper that gives us bronze. Copper is one of the most abundant of the higher metals, but it is also one of the softest, but when alloyed with tin in the proportion of from a tenth to a twelfth per cent., copper acquires the hardness requisite to fit it for all the purposes to which bronze was put. And as this is the proportion found in the bronze relics which have been dug up in the various countries, it is thence inferred that bronze was diffused from one center, and that center in Asia Minor. Brass is a later and different metal. It is the admixture of zinc with copper, and is not found in use till we come down to the rise of the Roman empire. f18 The invention of bronze carries us back to an unknown antiquity.

THE iron age is a sort of twilight between the utter night of the stone and bronze periods and the morning of history. Of all the metals iron is by far the most useful. This superiority it owes to its greater hardness, which permits, especially when converted into steel, tools to be made of it which are equally adapted for the most delicate operations and the roughest labors. With iron we can trace the finest line on the precious stone, or hew a pathway into the bowels of the mountain. When man came into possession of this metal, he wielded that one of all the material instrumentalities which was the fittest to give him the mastery of the globe. Man could now till the earth, quarry the rock, dig into the mine, clear the forest, build cities, and enclose them within impregnable ramparts. But what, perhaps, most pleased the Caledonian of that age was that he could now ride forth to battle in his war chariot, brandishing his flashing weapons, and blazing iii a coat of mail.

But if the first result of the introduction of iron, as in the case of bronze, was the dismal one of increased battlecarnage, aftertimes were to bring a compensation for this initial evil in the indefinite multiplication of the resources of art. The half- trained savage, as he busies himself smelting the ore and hammering the metal to forge therewith an instrument of slaughter little dreams that he is in reality a pioneer of peace. And yet it is so. He is making proof of a substance whose many unrivaled properties need only to be known to convince man that he now holds in his hand an instrument of such potency that compared with it Thor’s famous hammer was but a reed. When the qualities of iron shall have been tested and ascertained, man will be able to harness and set working in his service the mighty forces of steam and electricity. And when this has come to pass, the savage shall have grown into a sovereign with not an clement in earth, in sea, or in air, which is not his willing subject and servant. The mountain will part asunder to give him passage, the billows of the Atlantic will support his steps, and the lightnings will run on his errands to the ends of the earth.

In Asia, it is probable, was the discovery made that ironstone is an ore, and can be smelted and wrought like the more ductile bronze. At all events, it is in that quarter of the world that we come upon the first historic traces of this metal. The Homeric heroes are seen fighting with weapons of bronze and of iron. The dream of Nebuchadnezzar makes it undoubted that iron was known in Chaldea in his day. This metal formed an important part of the colossal figure that stood before the king in his sleep. f19 From the ancient centers- Egypt, Assyria, and Phoenicia- iron slowly made its way westward. Hesiod (B. C. 850) tells us that in his day it had superseded bronze among the Greeks. The Aryan races, which were the first to settle in Europe, were ignorant of metals. Not so the Celtae which succeeded them. They excelled in the metallurgic arts, and if not the filet teachers of the Romans in them, they greatly advanced their knowledge and proficiency. The Norici, a Celtic tribe, inhabiting near the Danube, and to whom is ascribed the art of converting iron into Steel, are believed to have supplied the Romans with iron weapons in their life and death struggle with Cartilage. In the days of Augustus, a Noric sword was as famous at Rome as a “Damascus blade” or an “Andrew Ferrara” in after times. From the Mediterranean iron traveled into northern Europe by the ordinary channels of commerce, and finally made its appearance in Britain. The Caledonians were, doubtless, at first dependent on the southern nations for their supply, but only for a time, for their country abounds in iron ore; and from the day that they learned the art of smelting, they were wholly independent of their neighbors for their supply of this useful metal. In the days of Caesar the native mines yielded, we know, enough for the needs of the inhabitants. Their implements and weapons were now of iron; their personal ornaments were formed of the same metal, along with bronze, which, though now dismissed from the service of the arts, was still retained in the business of personal ornamentation.

The change which iron brought with it in the arts and uses of life, was neither so sudden nor so radical as that which was attendant on the introduction of bronze. It was not to be expected that it would. The transition from bronze to iron was not by any means so great as that from stone to bronze. The change now effected was simply a change from an inferior metal to a higher. Many of the purposes served by iron had been served by bronze, though not so well. Custom and prejudice were on the side of the older metal. The savage would be slow to discard the tools which had served him aforetime, or to cast aside the ornaments in which he had taken no little pride, and which he might even deem more fitting than those, so lacking in glitter, as ornaments of iron. Besides, iron at first was doubtless the more costly. Though the most abundant of all the metals, its ore is the most difficult to smelt. It fuses only under an intense heat. But its greater utility at last carried the day and brought it into general use, first of all , in the field of battle. Self- preservation being the first law of nature, man will always make choice of the best material within his reach for the weapons with which he defends himself. The bronze sword was adapted only for attack. The warrior who was armed with it could deal a thrust, but he could not parry the return blow. His sword of cast bronze was apt to shiver like glass. It was useless as a weapon of fence. This revolutionized the battle- field; and we begin to find the record of that revolution in the cists and cairns. The leaf- shaped bronze sword disappears, and the iron brand comes in its room. The shape of the weapon, too, is different. The sword has now a guarded handle. It is clear that the warrior used it to parry the blow of his antagonist as well as deal a thrust, and this necessitated some contrivance for guarding his sword- hand. f20

From the battle- field, and the dreadful work there required of it, iron passed into the kindlier and lovelier uses of social and domestic life. And for some of the uses to which it was now put, iron would seem to be but little adapted, as, for instance, that of personal adornment. The modern beauty would think iron a poor substitute for gold in the matter of jewelry, and would feel nothing but horror in the prospect of appearing at the concert or in the ballroom as the horse appears in the battle, harnessed in iron.

But not so her sisters of two or three thousand years ago. They deemed that their charms had not justice done them unless they were set off in iron bracelets, iron anklets, and other trinkets of the same unlovely metal. Even their lords, who were hardly less enamoured of personal ornaments than their ladies, wore, Herodian tells us, their iron neckcollars and iron girdles as proudly as Roman his insignia of the finest gold; another proof, by the way, of the adage that there is no disputing about matters of taste. This much, however, can be said for the Caledonian, even that the metal was novel, that it was probably rare and costly, and therefore was deemed precious. Nor was the these things when he died. He took them with him to the grave, that he might appear in a manner befitting his rank in the spirit world. He would wear them in Odin’s Hall.

Iron, too, was used in the coinage of our country. The current money of our island in those days consisted in good part of iron coined into small rings. So Caesar informs us. Iron money has this advantage over gold, it better resists the tear and wear of use; and this may have recommended it to the Caledonians. We can imagine our ancestors going a- marketing provided with a score or two of these little iron rings. The Caledonian wishes to provide himself with a skin coat, or a plaid of the newest pattern and brightest colors, or ft hand- guarded iron sword, for flint arrow- heads and bronze- tipped spears are now antiquated; or he would like to grace his table with a drinking- cup, or a bowl, or other utensil turned on the wheel; or he aspires to present his better- half with a bracelet or a finger- ring, and having counted the cost and found that he is master of the requisite number of iron rings, he sets off to effect the purchase. The seller hands over the goods and takes the rings in payment; they are current money with the merchant. We moderns like to combine the beautiful with the useful even in these every- day matters. It gratifies our loyalty as well as our taste to see the image of our sovereign, bright and gracious every time we handle her coin. The Caledonian did not understand such subtle sentimentalities. The iron rings he traded with bore neither image nor superscription. They did his turn in the market nevertheless, and he was therewith content.

A gold coinage appears to have been not altogether unknown even then. “Little doubt is now entertained by our best numismatists,” says Wilson, “that the coins of Comius, and others of an earlier date than Cunobeline, or the first Roman invasion, include native British mintage. There is no question at any rate that they circulated as freely in Britain as in Gaul, and have been found in considerable quantities in many parts of the island. The iron or bronze or copper ring money of the first century must therefore be presumed as only analogous to our modern copper coinage, and not as the sole barbarous substitute for a minted circulating medium.”

These rings, in some cases, at least, were interred with the dead, despite the saying of Scripture that we bring nothing with us into the world and shall carry nothing out of it. The departing in these ages cartied with them the money with which they had traded in the markets of earth, or what portion of it their friends judged necessary. Here it is beside themin their graves, doubtless, in the idea that in some way or other it would be serviceable in the world beyond. The porter at the gate of Valhalla might be the more quick to open if he had the prospect of a gratuity. And the man to whom he gave admission- unless, indeed, this new world was altogether unlike the one from which he had come- would be all the more welcome that he was known to be not without assets, and might help his friends at a pinch. But not to dogmatize about the theory that underlay these burial ceremonies, the fact is undoubted that these little rings are found in the graves and cists of that ancient time lying alongside the skeleton of their former owner. The discovery, however, makes us little the wiser. The great enemy of iron is rust. The hardest of all the metals, it more quickly succumbs to corrosion than any of the others. The ring money found h~ the old graves cannot be described, because it cannot be handled and examined. It is found, on the opening of the tomb, to be nothing but a circlet of brown rust. The thin gold ornaments dug up at Mycenae, and now in the museum at Athens, are as old, at least, as our ring money, and yet they can be seen and handled at this day. Not so the iron coinage of our forefathers. Not unfrequently does it happen, when their graves are opened, that the small rings remain visible for a few minutes, and then, along with their companion skeleton, dissolve in ashes.

The cists and graves testify to the new face that began to appear on our northern and barbarous country on the coming of iron. With it the streaks of the historic dawn begin to be seen on the horizon. The. isolation of the land is now well nigh at an end. The Britons in the south are seen crossing and recrossing the channel in frequent intercourse with their neighbors and kinsfolk the Belgae. The arts draw them together. They understand one another’s speech. The coinage of the two nations passes from hand to hand on both sides of the sea. The tides of commerce flow more freely. The pulse of trade is quickened. State necessities, too, draw them to each other, and tend to cement their friendship. Rome is advancing northward, and wherever she comes she imposes her yoke, and the Britons, desirous, no doubt, of keeping the danger from their own door, send secret assistance to the Belgae in resisting the advances of their great enemy. The influences which this contact and commingling make operative in the south of the island extend into the north, bringing therewith a certain refinement to the Caledonian, and multiplying the resources of his art, of which we begin to find traces in that only writing he has left behind him- his cairns and cists, to wit. His art- designs are better defined, and also more graceful. He has better material to work with, and he does better work. He is gathering round him new appliances both for use and for ornament, and may now be said to stand on the level which the nations of Asia had reached five centuries before, or, it may be, earlier. His fighting equipage is now complete. He appears on the battlefield in his war- chariot; and when his battles come to an end, he takes it with him to the grave. For when we uncover his barrow, there are the iron wheels that were wont to career over the field, carrying dismay into the hostile ranks, resting in darkness- at peace, like the skeleton alongside. There, too, is his shield with its iron rim and studs, together with his sword, the prey, all of them, of the same devouring rust, but telling their tale, all the same, of bloody conflicts long since over. We have a glimpse, too, into the boudoirs of the period. We see the beauty performing her toilet with the help of a polished iron mirror; for when we open her cist, there, resting by her side, in the dark land, is the identical mirror in which she was wont to contemplate the image of her beauty when she lived beneath the sun; and there, too, are the trinkets of gold, of amber, and of other material which she wore above ground, and which she has taken with her as credentials of the rank she is entitled to claim in the world into which she has now passed. f21

Of the thrifts and industries practiced in the Scotland of those days, we have memorials not a few treasured up, unwittingly, long ago for our instruction in this latter age. Let us bestow a glance upon them. We have seen how the Caledonian could build, sagaciously planting his winter house far down in the warm earth, and his summer retreat of twigs hard by in the open air. Now that he is in possession of iron tools, many improvements, doubtless, take place in the accommodation and furnishings of his hut. But he knows also to weave. The loom of that age, like its plough, was of the simplest construction, existing only in its rudiments. It survives, however, in the cairns and cists- the great storehouse of pre- historic records- and with it specimens of the cloth woven upon it. Here is the long- handed, short- toothed comb with which the thread, having been passed through the warp, Was driven home. This, and the beam to which the threads were fastened, formed the loom. In the tumuli are found portions of cloth of a quality far from contemptible, and sometimes of bright and even beautiful colors. To create such fabrics on so rude a loom, argues both deftness and taste on the part of the workman. To pass from the weaver of the iron age to the potter, we trace, too, an advance in his art. The cups and vases dug up aremore elegantly shaped, and by means of a few waving lines, have a simple but graceful decoration given them. The art of glazing pottery- the color commonly being green- has now been found out. From the potter’s wheel we come to an instrument of still greater importance in domestic life. The grain- stones are now laid aside, and the quern has come in their room. May we not infer from this that a greater breadth of corn has now began to be grown, and that the natives depend more on the field than on the chase for their subsistence, and may have regaled themselves on the same dish that may yet be seen on the breakfast tables of our own day. Nor are the cists silent respecting so humble an actor on the scene as the dog. The attendant of man in all stages of his career, we know that he followed the steps and looked up into the face of the Caledonian, savage though he was, for here the bones of dog and master lie together in the same grave. And when the Caledonian was no longer a savage, though still a barbarian, he had broken to his use, and attached to his person and service, a yet nobler animal- the horse, to wit. For here, in the same barrow, beside the bones of the warrior, lie those of the steed that bore him into the battle, and mayhap carried him safely out of it. He shares the honour as he shared the perils of his master.

Nor did beauty in those days, any more than in ours, neglect the labors or disdain the aids of the toilet. Here are the whalebone combs, the bone and iron pins, and the articles of gold and amber and jet, which were employed in the arranging of the hair and the adorning of the person. These remain, but- such is the irony of time- the charms they helped to set off have long since faded. The men of those days, too, made merry on occasion. Here are the drinking- cups, the goblets, and the vases that figured at their banquets, once bright and sparkling, but now encrusted with the rust of two thousand years and more. In vain we question these witnesses of the long past carousals touching the liquor that filled them, and the warriors and knights that sat round the board and quaffed it, while the song of bard or the tale of palmer mingled in the loud din of the banqueting- hall. The climate of Scotland did not favor then, any more than in our day, the cultivation of the vine; but when denied the juice of the grape, man has seldom been at a loss to find a substitute, and commonly a more potent one. Our ancestors, like the Germans, regaled themselves on a beverage brewed from a mixture of barley and honey, termed mead; and, though stronger than the simple wines of southern lands, it was greatly less so than the potent drinks with which the art of distillation has since supplied their descendants.

The cuisine of the Caledonians of that period was far from perfect. But, if their food was cooked in homely fashion, it was varied and nutritious, as the long preserved relics of their feasts testify. The museum at Bulak shows us on what luxuries the Egyptians of four thousand years ago regaled themselves. The buried hearthstones of our country show us the dainties on which the Scottish contemporaries of these old Egyptians were used to feed. The wheatfields of Manitoba and Transylvania had not been opened to them. To the vineyards of Oporto and Burgundy they had no access. Of the tea and coffee plantations of China and Java they did not even dream. But their own island, little as had as yet been done to develop its resources, amply supplied their wants. They could furnish their boards from the cereals of their straths, the wild berries of their woods, the fish of their rivers, the milk and flesh of their herds, and the venison of their moors and mountains. There is not a broch in Orkney that does not contain the remains of the rein or red deer. The red deer does not exist in Orkney at this day; the animal continued down to about the twelfth century.

A marked feature in the Scottish landscape of those days was the broch. The broch was peculiar to Scotland; not a single instance of this sort of structure is to be found out of the country. The brochs were places of strength, and they tell of hostile visits to which Scotland was then liable, and which made it necessary for its inhabitants to provide for their safety. The brochs were built of dry stones; mark of tool is not to be seen upon them; nevertheless, their materials, though neither hewn nor embedded in mortar or lime, fit in perfectly, and make their wails compact and solid. When danger approached, we can imagine the whole inhabitants of a district leaving the open country and crowding into the broch with their goods, and finding complete protection within their strong enclosure. They were circular ramparts, in short, planted thick in some places- the districts, doubtless, most liable to incursion- and they must have given a fortified look to the land. Their average height was 50 feet, their diameter 40, and the thickness of their wail from 12 to 15 feet. Their door was on the ground level, but, for obvious reasons, unusually narrow and low. It was little over 3 feet in height and 2 in width. They were open to the sky within. Their thick wall was honeycombed with chambers, placed row above row, with a stair ascending within, and giving access to the circular chambers. Their windows looked into the area of the broch; their exteriors presented only an unbroken mass of building. In some instances they were provided with a well and a drain. There is not now one entire broch in Scotland, but their ruins are numerous. Not fewer than 370 have been traced in the country, mostly to the north of the Caledonian valley. More may have existed at one time, but their ruins have disappeared. The construction of these fabrics, so perfectly adapted to their purpose, argues a considerable amount of architectural skill on the part of their builders, and also a certain advance in civilization. The discovery of Roman coins, and the red glazed pottery of Roman manufacture in these brochs, indicate their existence and use down to the occupation of the southern part of Britain by the Romans.

There remains one point of great moment. What knowledge did the inhabitants of Scotland of that age possess of a Supreme Being and a future state? This is the inner principle of civilization, and, dissociated from it, no civilization is of much value, seeing it lacks the capability of being carried higher than a certain stage, or of lasting beyond a very brief period. What hold was this principle acquiring on our ancestors? We have only general considerations to guide us here.

Noah, before sending his sons forth to people his vast dominions, doubtless communicated to thcm, as we have said above, those Divine traditions which were their best inheritance, and which the posterity of Seth had carried down from Eden. He taught them the spirituality and unity of God; the institution of the Sabbath and marriage -the two foundation- stones of society; the fall of man, the promise of a Savior, and the rite of sacrifice. These great doctrines they were to carry with them in their several dispersions, and teach to their sons. As one who had come up out of the waters of the deluge- the grave of a worldthe words of Noah, spoken on the morrow of that tremendous catastrophe, would deeply impress themselves on the minds of his sons, and would remain for some considerable time, distinct and clear, in the memory and knowledge of their posterity. How long they did so we have no means of certainly knowing. Without a written record, and left solely to oral transmission, these doctrines, so simple and grand, and fully apprehended by Noah’s immediate descendants, would gradually come to be corrupted by additions, and obscured by allegory and legend. We know it to have been so as a fact. Hence the world of heathen mythology which grew up, and grafted itself on the men and events recorded in early Scripture. When the tenth or twentieth generation of the men who had sat at the feet of the great Patriarch arrived on the shores of Britain, it is natural to suppose that parts of the primeval revelation were lost, and that what of it was preserved was greatly obscured. But in the darkest eras of our country, as we shall afterwards see, t