OF THE HAMILTON ASSOCIATION, III 



enable him to sell his products in a distant place, he would require 

 to have some means of carrying them there. Without means of con- 

 veying merchandise from one place to another, all sorts of traffic 

 would be seriously impeded, and no doubt the insufficient and also 

 very hazardous modes of carriage, would to a great extent, interfere 

 with prehistoric man's commercial proclivities, but did not, as we 

 shall see, altogether keep him out of trade. 



The readiest and easiest mode of carriage would naturally be 

 by water ; hence we find the rivers of a country were the great high- 

 ways of early commerce. Of the value of water as a means of com- 

 munication prehistoric men were by no means ignorant, and we have 

 many evidences of primitive skill exhibited in the numerous canoes 

 which have been discovered in Great Britain, notably in the estuary 

 of the Clyde. In the district in which Glasgow now stands, no less 

 than seventeen canoes of various sizes have been discovered, and 

 what is now one of the greatest seats of shipping and ship-building 

 in the world appears to have been even in prehistoric times 

 the seat of a large population skilled in the science of naviga- 

 tion. The earliest race in Scotland of which any traces are to be 

 found, were essentially a nautical people. Numerous evidences of 

 their seafaring propensities have been found in various parts of that 

 country. Whether these canoes were used simply for coasting or 

 fishing or for the purposes of a long voyage it is difficult to say, but 

 one circumstance connected with the discovery of these vessels and 

 peculiarly interesting in any inquiry into the commercial relations of 

 these ancient navigators, is the fact mentioned by Dr. Wilson in his 

 Prehistoric Annals of Scotland, that one of the canoes found near 

 the present site of the city of Glasgow had a hole cut in the bottom 

 evidently for the purpose of drying the boat. This hole was neatly 

 filled by a plug not made of the wood of the district, but of cork. 

 Cork is a native of the Iberian Peninsula, and must have been 

 brought to the place where the canoe was found by some means — 

 evidently by trade in some way or other. Had it drifted there by 

 the sea current, a circumstance extremely unlikely when the distance 

 and position of the land past .which it must have floated is con- 

 sidered, it is very doubtful whether the ancient boat-builder was 

 provident enough to gather driftwood to serve his purposes. Unless 

 brought to him directly by some means he would be more 



