790 REPOET— 1889. 



above the present level of liigh water. Geolop:ists reo'ard this beach as a post- 

 glacial accumulation of marine origin, for the shells whicli it contains are not 

 Arctic but those of molluscs now extant in the seas of Scotland. In the subsoil 

 of this raised beach the skeletons of large whales have from time to time been 

 found, and as many as seven well authenticated specimens have been recorded. 

 They were all got under almost similar conditions, imbedded in a blue silt which 

 underlay a former peat moss, at a depth of usually three to five feet below the 

 present surface of the ground, and at levels varying, it is said, from ■'j feet to 25 

 teet above the present high-water mark. At the time when those whales were 

 .stranded the estuary of the Forth would have extended some eight or ten miles to 

 the west of the site of the town of Stirling, and there must have been a sufficient 

 depth of sea to permit, with a flowing tide, large whales to swim many miles 

 further west than is now possible, witli the risk, however, of becoming stranded as 

 the tide receded. It has been customary to speak of these whales as Greenland 

 whales ; by which term, I presume, has been meant the right whale, Balcena 

 viysticetus, which is an Arctic species. But the skeletons which I have examined 

 did not belong to the genus Balsena, but to the genus Balrenoptera, or the Finner 

 whales, several species of which now frequent the British seas. I have identified 

 one skeleton as that of Balcenoptera musculus. 



Associated with certain of these skeletons implements of stag's horn have been 

 occasionally found. The first specimen on record was obtained in 1819, on the 

 estate of Airthrey, close to the east gate of approach to Airthrey Castle. Mr. 

 Robert Bald, who described the finding of this skeleton, stated that close by it two 

 pieces of stag's horn were also got, through one of which a hole of about an inch 

 in diameter appears to have been bored. In 1824 the skeleton of a large whale 

 was exposed in digging a ditch on the estate of Blair-Drummond. Along with the 

 skeleton was found a fragment of a stag's horn, said to be like to that got along 

 with the Airthrey whale, and with a similar round hole bored through it. Mr. D. 

 Milne Home, in his work on the Estuary of the Forth, states that Mr. Home 

 Driimmond had informed him that a small piece of wood was in the hole in 

 the horn, which fitted it when found, though it has since considerably shrunk. 

 Unfortunately no trace of any of these pieces of stag's horn can now be obtained. 

 It can scarcely be questioned that the two horns with holes in them had been 

 fashioned into implements by human hands, but neither Mr. Bald nor Mr. Home 

 Drummond gives the shape of the pieces of horn, nor states the probable use to 

 which they had been apjilied. Several writers who have subsequently referred to 

 these specimens have, however, described them as lances or harpoons ; but the 

 brief statements about them by their discoverers scarcely justify this inference, for 

 in the fitting of a handle into either of such weapons a hole would not be bored 

 through the weapon but into one end of it. 



It is with peculiar satisfaction, therefore, that I have had an opportunity of 

 examining a third specimen of a stag's horn made into an implement and associated 

 with a whale's skeleton. In 1877 the skull and other bones of a Balfenoptera were 

 exposed in the course of drainage operations on the estate of JNIeiklewood, a few 

 miles west of Stirling. Resting upon the front of the skull, and lying vertically in 

 the blue silt, was an implement made of the horn of a red-deer, which possessed the 

 following characters: — It was 11 inches long and 6i inches in its greatest girth. 

 It consisted of a portion of the beam of the antler immediately above the frontal 

 burr and brow antler, and included that part of the beam from wliich the tine 

 second in order from the frontal burr had sprung. This tine had been broken oft', 

 and a hole had been bored, at that spot completely through the thickness of 

 the beam, 4 inches from one end and 7 inches from the other. The greatest 

 circumference of the implement was at the part through which the hole 

 was bored, and here it v/as slightly curved. The aperture where it opened on 

 the convexity from which the tine had sprung was oval and elongated in the 

 long axis of the beam, its dimensions being \\ inch by ^ inch ; on the opposite 

 aspect the aperture was almost circular and J inch in diameter. The shorter 

 segment of the antler was truncated, and shaped so that it could have been used 

 as a hammer. The opposite end was bevelled and smooth and pclished to a 



