peesidext's address. 267 



in connection with the working of a lead-mine.*' Nor can 

 we think that the rate of peat-deposit gives to the relics of hu- 

 man origin buried beneath it a similar vast antiquity. The peat 

 rests on the boulder-clay in South TJist in the Hebrides, and yet 

 there have been found below the peat, and therefore proved to 

 be older than all the superincumbent mass, not only a stone 

 axe, and a bronze sword, but, which could hardly have been 

 expected, a common Norway scoop or bailer. f The growth of 

 peat on the moors of the Island of Lewis seems to have been 

 comparatively rapid, for the laminse in the section of a peat-bank 

 there, show that nine feet have been accumulated in seventeen 

 centuries. 



It is conceded, again, by Mr. Evans and Professor Boyd-Daw- 

 kins, that no uniform unvarying amount of erosion of a river- 

 valley can be insisted upon in reckoning the probable antiquity 

 of the gravel-imbedded implements of Palaeolithic man. The 

 time when man was contemporary with the mammoth in the 

 continental period of Great Britain and Ireland need not be 

 j)laced so far back, if we recall the historic fact that the Island 

 of Jersey, now separated from the mainland of France by 

 fourteen miles of sea, was in the sixth century of our era severed 

 only by a little stream over which a plank served as a foot-bridge. 

 And as observers tell us that the distinctness of the glacial 

 phenomena in the Hebrides appears to denote a more recent date 

 than is usually supposed, so the historic evidence of the existence 

 of the reindeer in Caithness, down to the twelfth century, points 

 the same way.j' Sir F. Palgrave shows that at the time of the 

 Norman conquest our climate must have been much colder than 

 it is now. The dome-roofed cells, with long tunnelled entrances 

 on account of the rigour of the climate, such as the Eskimo 

 hut or iglooe of Anastak in North Greenland, have their 

 counterparts in the bo'hs of Lewis and the clochans of Kerry. 

 But " Picts' houses" have been discovered south of the Forth at 

 Bathgate, Lanark, and Lesmahago ; and Dr. Smith found one of 



* "Nature," December 18th, 1873. 



t Proceedings of Soc. Antiq. Scot., Vol. VII., p. 194. 



X "Cave-Hunting," chap. III., p. 76, A. I). lir>o. from the Orkneylnga Saga. 



