1897.] on Early Man in Scotland. 397 



or fish spears made of the horns of deer were obtained ; similar in 

 form to those found in the Victoria Cave, Settle, in Kent's Cavern, 

 and in the grotto of La Madelaiue, France, which in some of these 

 instances have been associated with Palaeolithic objects. 



An account was then given of the construction and contents of the 

 chambered horned cairns in Caithness and the north-west of Scotland, 

 which have been so carefully investigated and described by Dr. 

 Joseph Anderson.* The presence of incinerated bones and of unburnt 

 skeletons showed the cairns to have been places of interment, whilst 

 flint flakes and scrapers, bone and jjolished stone implements, and 

 shallow vessels of coarse clay, associated them with Neolithic man, 

 obviously the same race as the builders of the English long barrows. 



Stone abounds in Scotland, and the polished stone implements, 

 which have been found in every county, in the soil and near the 

 surface of the ground, are often of large size and beautifully ground 

 and polished. Flint, ou the other hand, is confined to a few localities, 

 as the island of Mull and limited areas in the counties of Banff and 

 Aberdeen. The nodules are as a rule small in size, and though 

 adapted for the manufacture of arrow-heads and scrapers, flint does 

 not seem to have attained the same importance in Scotland as the raw 

 material provided by nature for the manufacture of articles used by 

 Neolithic man, as was the case in England and Ireland. 



Although there is ample evidence of the nature of the implements 

 and weapons manufactured by Neolithic man, and of his methods of 

 interment in rock shelters and chambered cairns, no traces of built 

 dwellings which can be ascribed to the people of this period have 

 been discovered. Doubtless their habitations were constructed of 

 loose stones and turf, and sun-dried clay, or of the skins of animals 

 killed in the chase spread over the branches of trees, which, from 

 their fragile and destructible character, have not been preserved. 



In the course of time stone and bone, readily procurable, and which 

 are directly provided by nature for the use of man, gave place to 

 materials which required for their manufacture considerable skill and 

 knowledge. The introduction of bronze as a substance out of which 

 useful articles could be made, marked an important step in human 

 development, and could only take place after men had learnt by 

 observation the ores of copper and tin, and by experiment the methods 

 of extracting the metals from them, and the proportions in which 

 they should be combined in the alloy in order to secure the necessary 

 hardness. So far as Scotland is concerned, bronze must have been 

 introduced from without ; its manufacture could not have been of 

 indigenous development, as the ores of tin and copper do not occur 

 in North Britain. Doubtless it came from the southern part of our 

 island, and was extensively employed in South Britain long before it 

 became substituted in the north for the more primitive materials. 



There is abundant iuformation that Scotland had a Bronze Age. 



♦ ' Scotland iu Pagan Times,' Ediuburgb, 1886. 



