40 TORRS WARREN. 
by man, the stones having all been placed there by him. A dry 
sandy surface, thickly covered with stones, prevents vegetation 
from growing. This is contrary to what might have been expected. 
I once removed a lot of stones from a small area of sand, 
expecting the wind would lay bare something good, but to my 
astonishment this bit became covered with plants, and has 
remained so ever since. Stones get almost too hot when the sun 
shines strongly for one to hold his hand on them, and where they 
occur plentifully on the sand seedlings get scorched. Broken 
stones are always accompanied by worked flints and hand-made 
pottery, and they do not occur, to any extent at least, on the 
new ground. ‘They occupy the old surfaces, one above another, 
and separated by greater or lesser thickness of blown sand, and 
reaching from an inch to several feet in thickness. In these 
surfaces they are sometimes crowded closely together, but often 
they occur at intervals. The older these surfaces are the older, of 
course, the articles found in them; but it by no means follows that 
the antiques got in any particular surface on soil-layer are 
contemporaneous. At the present time, for instance, we see the 
articles from, it may be, several dark layers (old surfaces) all 
reduced to a common level by the blowing away of the sand. 
This must have occurred before, and not only that, but as the old 
people were constantly on the look-out for flint-nodules (from 
which to make arrow-points, scrapers, etc.), quartzite and other 
pebbles (for hammers, anvils, polishers, etc.), and any kind of 
pebbles for heating and roasting stones, they, with the exception 
of the first settlers, would constantly be finding articles, some of 
them perhaps pretty old, which would be left along with those 
lying on the ground then being occupied. From this it will be 
seen that the study of these old land surfaces and the articles they 
contain is a very complicated and perplexing one, and he would 
be a very self-confident individual who should “ pronounce” 
with certainty on the relative age of any articles from the ever- 
shifting sands of Torrs Warren ; the best he can do being to make 
faithful records of what he finds. 
Darwin in his Voyage tells us that the South American Indians 
make fires of bones gathered from the land, and he was surprised 
at the amount of heat those fires gave out. I have seen numerous 
accumulations, both on the Torrs, and in Ayrshire, of burnt bones. 
