A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 1 7f 



ledge of substances and qualities afterwards lost, until re-dis- 

 covered by scientific curiosity, would form of itself an exceed- 

 ingly curious chapter. The art of the gun-flint maker (and 

 it, too, promises soon to pass into extinction) is unquestion- 

 ably a curious one, but not a whit more curious or more in- 

 genious than the art possessed by the rude inhabitants of our 

 country eighteen hundred years ago, of chipping arrow-heads 

 with an astonishing degree of neatness out of the same stub- 

 born material They found, however, that though flint made 

 a serviceable arrow-head, it was by much too brittle for an 

 adze or battle-axe ; and sought elsewhere than among the 

 Banffshire gravels for the rock out of which these were to 

 be wrought Where they found it in our northern provinces 

 I have not yet ascertained It is but a short time since I 

 came to know that they were before-hand with me in the 

 discovery of the bituminous jet of the Lower Old Bed Sand- 

 stone, and were excavators among its fossiliferous beds. The 

 vitrified forts of the north of Scotland give evidence of yet 

 another of the obsolete arts. Before the savage inhabitants 

 of the country were ingenious enough to know the uses of 

 mortar, or were furnished with tools sufficiently hard and 

 solid to dress a bit of sandstone, they must have been ac- 

 quainted with the chemical fact, that with the assistance of 

 fluxes, a pile of stones could be fused into a solid wall, and 

 with the mineralogical fact, that there are certain kinds of 

 stones which yield much more readily to the heat than others. 

 The art of making vitrified forts was the art of making ram- 

 parts of rock through a knowledge of the less obstinate earths 

 and the more powerful fluxes. I have been informed by 

 Mr Patrick Duff of Elgin, that he found, in breaking open a 

 vitrified fragment detached from an ancient hill-fort, distinct 

 impressions of the serrated kelp-weed of our shores, the iden- 

 tical flux which, in its character as the kelp of commerce, was 

 so extensively used in our glass-houses only a few years ago. 



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