THE- HAMILTON ASSOCIATION. 149 



peculiarity in manufacture which enables him to detect differences 

 which men who have not made the matter a study cannot perceive. 

 For my own part I was unable to recognize a collection of stone and 

 flint implements from the Highlands and Lowlands of Scotland when 

 mixed with a like assortment from such as are seen in our Irish 

 Academy, Dublin. 



Where a marked superiority may be noted in a few instances, it 

 may be owing to individual skill as well as to the spare time a pas- 

 toral family tribe may have at their disposal for manufacture. No 

 doubt the number of celts in the Irish Academy (500 nearly thirty 

 years ago when I was in Dublin), may have been considerably in- 

 creased since then. 



In the papers published by the Belfast Naturalists' Field Club, 

 some years ago, it was stated that many of the beautiful bronze 

 spears and swords now in the Belfast Museum were found in that 

 district in tumuli. The latter are of two kinds, one long and taper- 

 ing (rapier like), the other short and wide (leaf shape). If the state- 

 ment is quite accurate it goes far to prove that the people of the 

 bronze age buried their dead in the same manner as the race which 

 used stone and flint instruments. 



It certainly is difficult to understand how men unacquainted 

 with the use of metals (as the earlier colonists), could have raised 

 up and placed in position the enormous masses of rocks which form 

 the covering flags of several of the Ulster cromlechs. One of the 

 blocks (Cloughmore), is granite. It is 13 feet long, 10 wide, and 5 

 in thickness. Its estimated weight is 50 tons ; several others 

 weigh but little less. It appears to me equally difficult to offer any 

 satisfactory explanation regarding the Irish mound-builders. The 

 tumuli of Ulster seem more numerous than in Connaught, where 

 the descendants of the Fir-bolg Celts are supposed by many Irish 

 antiquarians to be still represented. I differ altogether from the 

 writers who suppose the differently shaped bronze swords may be 

 attributed respectively to the Belgian and Danann tribes. Both I 

 think characleristic of the latter. The kistvans of Ulster are 

 tumuli on a larger scale, containing several chambers. I cannot say 

 whether they are confined to the province. I have not seen them in 

 any others ; that is purely negative evidence and does not show their 

 non-existence. An Irish guide was asked the meaning of this term 

 by an English tourist. "Sure, man alive," was the reply, "'tis the 



