26 THE CRUISE OP THE BETSEY ; OR, 



up from under the bones. An islander found among them, 

 shortly before our visit, a sewing needle of copper, little more 

 than an inch in length ; fragments of Eigg shoes, of the kind 

 still made in the island, are of comparatively common occur- 

 rence ; and Mr James Wilson relates, in the singularly gra- 

 phic and powerful description of Uamh Fraingh which oc- 

 curs in his "Voyage round the Coasts of Scotland" (1841), 

 that a sailor, when he was there, disinterred, by turning up 

 a flat stone, a " buck-tooth" and a piece of money, the lat- 

 ter a rusty copper coin, apparently of the times of Mary of 

 Scotland. I also found a few teeth : they were sticking fast 

 in a fragment of jaw ; and, taking it for granted, as I sup- 

 pose I may, that the dentology of the murderous M'Leods 

 outside the cave must have very much resembled that of the 

 murdered M 'Donalds within, very harmless-looking teeth they 

 were for being those of an animal so maliciously mischievous 

 as man. I have found in the Old Ked Sandstone the strong- 

 based tusks of the semi-reptile Holoptychius ; I have chi- 

 selled out of the limestone of the Coal Measures the sharp, 

 dagger-like incisors of the Megalichthys ; I have picked up 

 in the Lias and Oolite the cruel spikes of the crocodile and 

 the Ichthyosaurus ; I have seen the trenchant, saw-edged 

 teeth of gigantic Cestracions and Squalidse that had been dis- 

 interred from the Chalk and the London Clay ; and I have 

 felt, as I examined them, that there could be no possibility 

 of mistake regarding the nature of the creatures to which 

 they had belonged ; they were teeth made for hacking, tear- 

 ing, mangling, for amputating limbs at a bite, and laying 

 open bulky bodies with a crunch : but I could find no such 

 evidence in the human jaw, with its three inoffensive-looking 

 grinders, that the animal it had belonged to, far more ruth- 

 less and cruel than reptile-fish, crocodiles, or sharks, was of 

 such a nature that it could destroy creatures of even its own 

 kind by hundreds at a time, when not in the least incited by 



