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a legionary sword blade, 6 inches in length, and 1| inch in 

 breadth, tapering to 1 inch. I say a legionary sword, because 

 this weapon had a short, very stiff blade ; and the fragment is 

 certainly part of such a blade. The swords of the Auxiliary 

 soldiers were of various shapes, as they were suffered to retain 

 their own national weapons. The cohort of Dacians, for example, 

 on Hadrian's wall, used curved swords, one of which is figured 

 on a tomb-stone found at their station of Amboglanna, now 

 Birdoswald, near Carlisle ; as well as on the Trajan column 

 at Rome. {See Beuce's Roman Wall.) The Roman soldiers 

 depended more on stabbing than cutting, as inflicting more 

 dangerous wounds. The swords of the northern nations of 

 Europe are all long-hladed ; as, for example, the claymore of 

 the Caledonians, and the long sword of the Norsemen. The 

 southern nations, Spaniards, Italians, and Greeks, to the present 

 day usually fight by stabbing ; and the bayonet of modern war- 

 fare, as the reader will remember, is said to take its name from 

 the town in which it was invented, at the foot of the Pyrennees. 

 Although there is no evidence of this, it certainly reached this 

 country from France. 



V. A soldier's whetstone, shaped like an A with a hole drilled 

 through the upper corner, by which to suspend it from the belt. 

 It bears marks of considerable service, shewing not only a 

 hollowing of the sides from sharpening knives, &c., but notches 

 made by removing the "wire edge." Professor Church, who 

 kindly assisted me during part of the excavation, at once identi- 

 fied this stone as the counterpart of one found with Roman 

 remains at Cirencester, and now in the museum of that town. 



I also found a small hone of very hard fine black stone : a 

 flattish water- worn pebble, about 2 by 1 inch, which bears on one 

 of its surfaces the bright sheen of bronze, from the sharpening 

 of a pin on it. It owes this singular freshness to the accident 

 of its having been surrounded by a few handfulls of potter's clay, 

 which had kept it perfectly air-tight. A good deal of this pottery- 

 earth lay scattered among the other soil. So perfect is the 

 preservation of any object that happens to have been cased with 

 clay, that the late W. Aekeh of this city, found a horse-shoe 

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