154 NOTES ON RASPlJEnRY PLANTS. 



"In answer to your letter, by which I find you are seeking for confirmation 

 of the account of the raspberry seeds, which were found some years ago in 

 a barrow near Maiden Castle, by Mr. Maclean, I am very happy to place 

 at your service my small share of evidence in his behalf. About the year 

 1835, and I believe some few years later, Mr. Maclean was in lodgings on 

 the Cornhill, Dorchester, and I often talked with him on subjects of animal 

 and vegetable physiology, as well as on the Gaelic language, which I wished 

 to compare with Welsh, and which was his mother tongue. At one time, 

 when I was at Mr. Maclean's rooms, he showed me some pieces of brownish 

 earth-like matter, of rather cylindrical form, and hard throughout, though, as T 

 thought, still more hardened at the surface. He pounded some of it in my 

 presence, and showed me that a large proportion of it consisted of plant seeds. 

 He told me he had found it in some jaw-bones, in a barrow which he had 

 found somewhere near Maiden Castle; and that from its form, its matter, 

 and its place in the barrow, he fully believed it was a portion of the contents 

 of the colon of the man whose jaw-bones he had found near it. He told 

 tne that the teeth on the jawbones were those of an old man, but that 

 none of those bore signs of caries, and were worn down to the gums. 1 am 

 sure I am not mistaking these circumstances, for they afterwards formed the 

 subject of much thought, in which I at length drew a conclusion, which 

 might have been too hasty a one, that the only appearance of caries in the 

 teeth of civilized tribes, and especially of our own race — the Teutonic — was 

 owing to high feeding, if not flesh-eating, and therefore I rejected flesh food 

 through an interval of many years. 



Mr. Maclean told me he had sent some of this seedy halfcoprolite substance 

 to some botanist — I believe Dr. Lindley; and at another time he showed me, 

 as it seemed, with much pleasure and pride, a spray of a raspberry plant, 

 which he said had sprung from one of the seeds of the seedy substance which 

 he had shown me as the contents of the colon of an Ancient Briton, and 

 that the sprig had come to him from the gentleman to whom he had sent 

 the seeds, and under whose care they had germinated. And, lastly, I once called 

 upon him, and found in his room two or three of the labourers who had opened, 

 under his own eyes, the barrow in which the seeds were found; and he told 

 me they had just signed a declaration of their knowledge of their finding of 

 the seedy substance in the barrow, and, as I believe, though I did not hear 

 the declaration of its manner and form, and relative place. I fully trust in 

 Mr. Maclean's good faith through the whole of the transaction, and know, or 

 believe most confidently, that he opened a barrow near this town, and that 

 he found in it the seedy substance which he showed as what he thought the 

 contents of the colon of a Briton who was buried in the barrow; and that 

 he sent some of it to some gentleman in or near London; and that he after- 

 wards received from him a twig of a raspberry plant, which he was told, and 

 believed, had grown from the seed of it. Mr. Maclean is now dead. The 

 ^^Gardeners' Chronicle" makes Mr. Maclean to have said 'he found a coffm 



