MARINE BIOLOGICAL STATION AT PORT ERIN. 61 



ILLUSTRATED NOTES 



ON 



MANKS ANTIQUITIES. 



The Isle of Man is interesting from various points of 

 view, and many of the more or less scientific summer 

 visitors to its shores must often have found intellectual 

 delights in its marine biology and its botany, in its rocks 

 and fossils and in tracing the survival of ancient customs 

 and the still earlier remains of prehistoric Man. The past 

 history of the land and the people is so constantly and so 

 prominently brought before the eye and the imagination 

 by Tynwald Hill and Rushen Castle, by early Celtic and 

 Scandinavian carvings, by ruined " keeils " and holy 

 wells, by tumulus and standing stone, by cup-markings, 

 archaic pottery and fields of chipped flint, leading back to 

 the remains of extinct animals and the work of the great 

 ice-age, that the observer naturally desires some guide 

 which will enable him to place and classify, however 

 imperfectly, these ancient records from the soil and the 

 rocks. Although these unwritten records may not enable 

 us to form anything approaching a complete and satis- 

 fying history, they yield welcome glimpses into the past 

 state of our land, and show us something of the habits of 

 races that have contributed to our ancestry. 



Archaeology traced back to its beginnings merges 

 into Geology ; and we find on examination that the Isle of 

 Man has been a land-mass since very early geological 

 times. The precise age of the oldest stratified rocks 



