H.— ANTHROPOLOGY. 143 



for the infant science. But at this distance of time we may forgive his 

 eccentricities and honour his memory for the substantial service which 

 he rendered to our common cause. In point of fact, it was probably the 

 first president's very vanity, so severely stigmatised by Scott, that inspired 

 William Smellie to produce his full contemporary ' Account ' of the origin 

 of the Society and its Museum with a list, or rather lists, of acquisitions. 

 Lord Buchan's speeches and letters, which are there to be found verbatim, 

 show plainly how limited was the archaeological horizon of the age of 

 Jonathan Oldbuck. 



Thus in his inaugural address, which maps out the field of the new 

 Society's activities, he states explicitly that the starting-point must be 

 ' the period of the Roman attempts to subjugate the northern parts of 

 Britain.' The monuments which we call prehistoric but which in those 

 days were called Druidical, ' the Cairn, the Mount of Earth, Four Grey 

 Stones covered with Moss ' — I am quoting his own words — he attributes 

 to the time of Ossian, and Ossian and his heroes he supposes to have lived 

 in the reign of Caracalla. It is quite consistent with such a perspective 

 that, after a gift of twenty pounds in cash, the first recorded donation to 

 the Museum should have been ' a quantity of Roman arms, consisting of 

 twenty-three pieces of the heads of hasta and jaculum, twenty pieces of 

 the blades, and nine of the handles of the gladius and pugio ; a ring, three 

 inches in diameter, fastened to the end of a staple ; and a mass of different 

 pieces of these arms, run together by fire, all of brass.' It is not easy to 

 realise that the objects masquerading in this classical garb are the contents 

 of the well-known Bronze Age hoard which was dredged from the marl 

 at the bottom of Duddingston Loch. 



Bronze Age weapons, indeed, are systematically labelled ' Roman ' in 

 the ofiicial record. Nor was it only to weapons that the epithet was 

 applied. The relics of a Bronze Age interment figure as ' an antient 

 sacrificing ax of Roman brass . . . antient Roman cinereal urns . . . and 

 pieces of burnt Roman bones.' That is typical. The men of the Stone 

 Age fare even worse. Their bones are not, it is true, subjected to the 

 indignity of being dubbed ' Roman.' But their relics are sadly to seek 

 among the 



' fouth o' auld nick-nackets : 

 Rusty airn caps, and jinglin jackets 

 Wad haud the Lothians three in tackets 



A towmont gude ; 

 And parritch-pats and auld saut-backets 

 Before the Flood.' 



One or two perforated axe-heads of stone do appear in the catalogue, but 

 they stand cheek by jowl with lusus naturce like ' a chicken, preserved in 

 •spirits, having two heads conjoined laterally at the back of the skull.' 

 They are entered, too, under the old-fashioned name of ' purgatory 

 hammer,' an echo of the popular belief that the purpose of placing such 

 objects in graves was to equip the spirit of the dead with an instrument 

 which should be sufficiently heavy to ensure a prompt response to his 

 knocking at the gate of the after-world. Yet, despite the quaintness of 

 these first beginnings, the institution thus cradled has developed, within 



