1893-94.] 6 9 



continent, and before the waves of the Atlantic had gnawed 

 away those ranges of basalt and limestone that once connected 

 our northern shores with Scotland. When the primeval 

 nomad of Europe, moving ever westward from the cradle of 

 the race, impelled by his instinct to follow the declining sun, 

 found his further progress stopped in this Ultima Thule of the 

 West, where, then as now, the edge of winter was dulled by 

 the soft influences of the Gulf Stream, and where no intolerable 

 summers scorched up its perennial streams — the land thus 

 described by Ferguson : — 



" There is honey in the trees where her misty vales expand, 

 And her forest paths in summer are by falling waters fanned ; 

 There is dew at high noon-tide there, and springs in the yellow sands 

 On the fair hills of holy Ireland." 



In this land of unfading verdure he may have been tempted to 

 cease from his wanderings ; here, first perhaps, to raise by the 

 labour of his hands a fixed abode for those dependent on him, 

 that first momentous step in the long struggle with the powers 

 of nature that was destined to transform the savage; and, as the 

 simple primordial cell which, biologists tell us, was the earliest 

 dawn of organism, held within it, by the law of its being, all 

 future developments of life ; so in some of these rude earthen 

 dwellings around us we may perhaps still behold the very 

 germ of our Western civilisation, the germ that involved, not 

 alone the loftiest palace of the present day, but also all those 

 refinements and sanctities that have clustered round the thought 

 of home ! 



Note. — Since reading the foregoing paper my attention has 

 been called to an appendix to O'Laverty's " Diocese of Down 

 and Connor," vol. 4, which is a list given by one Thos. Fagan 

 of antiquities found and " forts " demolished by the farmers, in 

 several parishes, in the Counties of Down, Antrim, and Armagh, 

 during the early part of the present century. A careful analysis 

 of this list (which includes, under the general title "forts," 

 earthworks of all descriptions) will yield little or nothing to 



