346 Dr. Mac Culloch on the Parallel Roads of Glen Roy. 



great magnitude and importance to admit of such a solution with- 

 out a more strict species of evidence ; or, in defect of that evidence, 

 of such collateral and circumstantial proofs as can be deduced from 

 its present appearance and connections, from the probable motives 

 in which it may have originated, and from the contrary deficiency 

 in probability of other assigned causes. It is said that they were 

 roads made for the purposes of hunting the deer : such are the 

 assigned motives. Admitting them, it is necessary to examine how 

 far this pursuit was likely to be aided by the contrivance in question. 

 Two practices are chiefly in use in this chace. The first of these is to 

 approach the deer while in their pasture or at rest, by such circuitous 

 ways as to protect the hunter equally from their acute scent or 

 their sight ; a practice known by the name of deer-stalking. The 

 other consists in driving them by a power of men or dogs, or both, 

 in such a direction as to pass the stationed hunter, who thus shoots 

 rhem in their course. Another notion has however been main- 

 tained relative to the method of hunting in this place and in those 

 times. It has been imagined that the roads were fenced with stakes 

 on each side, and used as a sort of decoy, into which the deer were 

 driven, to be afterwards shot at leisure by those who were stationed 

 without. 



It is impossible to conceive that they were used as stations from 

 whence to shoot deer at rest, since a fixed point must be unavailable 

 in this variety of the chace, and since the exposure of the hunter 

 himself would render the invention useless. For similar reasons 

 they could be of no use in driving the deer, as the herds must 

 necessarily pass in the greater number of cases so as to be out of 

 bow 8hot. Although in the upper parts of the glen the distance 

 from the lowest line to the bottom of the valley is trifling, yet at its 

 lower part that distance becomes far greater than the range of an 



