xxiv HISTORY OF THE OUTER HEBRIDES. 



representing, according to some writers, the number of 

 men whom they had slain in battle during their lifetime. 

 Wormius mentions this custom as appertaining to 

 Scandinavia, and according to Olaus Magnus (who was 

 Archbishop of Upsal about the middle of the seventeenth 

 century), the shape of the stones, whether long, square, 

 round, or wedge-shaped, had a signification which differed 

 with the form. Hector Boece says that Reutha, who, 

 according to Scottish chronology, lived in the second 

 century B.C., was the first Scots king to "put nobill men 

 for their vailyeant dedes in memory" by commanding 

 that "mony hie stones" be set about the sepulture of 

 " every nobill man as was slain be him of Britonis." "In 

 memory hereof," he goes on to say, "sundry of thaim 

 remain yet in the Hielands that the pepill may know sic 

 men were vailyeant in thair dayis." He adds that these 

 sepulchres were consequently held in great reverence by 

 the people. If the custom to which allusion has just 

 been made, regulated the number of stones of which the 

 Callernish remains are composed, the warrior whose bones 

 were found in the "black unctuous substance" must indeed 

 have been a mighty man of valour. Lewis traditions con- 

 nect these standing stones with devotional worship, and 

 in some instances with magic : " men converted into stone 

 by an enchanter." 



When we go a step further, and try to ascertain and 

 this, from the historian's point of view, is really the 

 important point what manner of people they were who 

 built these tombs, with their stone enclosures, we find 

 ourselves hopelessly nonplussed. Modern research has 

 endeavoured to identify them with a Finnish or Ugrian 

 race of the Bronze Age, who preceded the Celts in these 

 islands. The tombs are just as likely to have been the 

 work of a neolithic race, whose origin is lost in the depths 

 of antiquity. The aboriginal inhabitants of Lewis were 

 almost certainly a pre-Celtic people and spoke a non- 

 Aryan language. Dr. Beddoe, the well-known ethnologist, 

 who visited Lewis some years ago, traced three distinct 



