Notes on Yarrow. By James Hardy. 407 



near this spot was built, the shepherd was breaking up the ground allotted 

 for the garden ; and he came upon several similar cists, with bones in them; 

 he went to call his wife to look at them, but before she could get to the 

 spot they had begun to crumble into dust, and were gone in a few minutes J 

 There were eight, I think, found in the garden. 



I never heard of this discovery otherwise, but of course there was little 

 to be seen. But Dr. Eussell said he had looked up the subject at the time, 

 and made out, chiefly from Sir Henry Rawlinson's writings, that the pre- 

 servation or immediate destruction of bones and other objects suddenly 

 uncovered — the phenomena of their crumbling to dust is quite familiar 

 — seems to depend on whether the air has been completely excluded or 

 not. If it has, the change that takes place on its sudden admission after 

 many centuries, is so great, that everything except stones and so on, every- 

 thing organic, becomes disintegrated at once ; while in exactly similar cases? 

 if the tomb or chamber has had chinks which admitted the air, things in 

 a dry climate will last indefinitely. This is said to have been observed to 

 a great degree, in the heaps of half-baked bricks, which seem always to 

 have enclosed the rooms in the jialaces of Nineveh. I do not know whether 

 the theory is altogether correct, but the facts are well known. " 



Mr Ourrie lias sent me a sketch of a section of one of the cists 

 referred to in the preceding letter, and previously in the record 

 of Proceedings, p. 271. It is 5 feet 4 inches in length. It is on 

 the eastern end of Warrior's Eest field, at the road side. " The 

 end of it, " he says, writing Dec. 18, 1883, "is open on the escarp- 

 ment of gravel sloping to the public road, and a twelvemonth ago 

 was full of bones. There is not a bone in it now, except a small 

 part of a rib, which being still firm in texture shows the remark- 

 able state of preservation of bone when lying in a bed of gravel. " 



I have obtained from Mr William Bell, schoolmaster, Yarrow, 

 what information he could collect about the remains found in a 

 stone cist near Whitehope Farm House. It appears to be the 

 skeleton Miss Eussell heard of as being sent to Edinburgh. ' ' The 

 skeleton was that of a full grown male. The legs had been 

 broken and doubled up. After the discovery the skull was first 

 in the posession of Dr, Shaw, and then the Eev. Dr. Eussell got 

 it and sent it to the Edinburgh Museum, where it now is. The 

 bones were interred in Yarrow Church Yard by Dr. Eussell. The 

 cist was of rude construction. The unpolished stone slabs had 

 been brought from a quarry a mile off, where flag stones are 

 still obtained. " This again points to the deliberate and careful 

 manner in which some of the interments had taken place. 



In a recent visit to St. Mary's Churchyard Mr Bell found the 

 oldest date on the tombs there was 1699. 



