SOCIETY OF THE UNIVERSITY OP ABERDEEN. 85 



and feebler in development than the fair races, while their skull form 

 remains dolichocephalic. Professor Boyd-Dawkins designates them 

 Iberians, and looks upon them as related to that puzzling people, 

 the Basques of the Pyrenees. The palaeolithic or Old Stone Age was 

 distinguished by a low race, whose skill in making stone implements 

 was so poor as to make it often hard to tell whether a weapon is 

 fabricated or not. Yet this savage in some artistic instances could 

 draw. 



After this came the New Stone Age, in which our interest mainly 

 centres, when a gradually improving and in the end highly finished 

 article might be manufactured, usually of flint or bone, when the art 

 of knitting if not weaving was known, and that of fashioning 

 pottery and of cultivating some plants, cereals among them. Neo- 

 lithic man possessed domestic animals, the sheep, the goat, the dog, 

 the horse and very probably the ox. Towards the end of this period, 

 we find a slight knowledge of metals as evidenced by a few bronze 

 pins and small ornaments. 



With the Celt came a great step forward, when the knowledge of 

 metals reached a practically useful and important stage. 



All this must be taken as an impressionist picture of many ages, 

 that overlapped each other, and even lapsed backward at certain 

 points, and intermingled and shaded off, one into the other, like the 

 colours of the rainbow. 



There are bones in some of those prehistoric tombs that indicate 

 men of powerful build and large endurance, with crania of great 

 capacity. For example, one of the Oban cave skulls was capable of 

 containing not less than 1730 c.c., "a lact," says Sir W. Turner, 

 " which places it on a level with some of the most capacious skulls 

 of modern Scotsmen which I have measured ". 



The paper concluded with an inventory of the grave-goods found 

 in the various kinds of sepulchres. These consist of three different 

 kinds pottery, personal ornaments and weapons. Of pottery the 

 most frequent objects are urns of various shapes, generally designated 



