THE CRANIOLOGY OF THE PEOPLE OP SCOTLAND. 173 



our knowledge of the objects which characterised the successive periods of human 

 occupation, but he did not personally study the head form. Sir Arthur Mitchell 

 in his Rhind Lectures* On the Past in the Present and in the Proceedings of the 

 Society of Antiquaries of Scotland had illuminated various questions in archaeology. 

 In a lecture "On Early Man in Scotland " t I summarised facts up to that time 

 recorded regarding the people of the stone and bronze ages. Since then, Dr Robert 

 Munro in his Prehistoric Scotland X has traced the progress of civilisation during 

 successive epochs and has discussed the craniology of the people. Professor Thomas 

 H. Bryce and Dr Alexr. Low of Aberdeen have recorded § the cranial characters and 

 affinities of early races, whilst the Hon. John Abercromby has published a com- 

 prehensive treatise On the Bronze Age Pottery of Great Britain and Ireland.]] 



Neolithic or Polished Stone Period. 



Traces of the presence of man in Scotland date from the formation of the 

 40—50 foot beach. Mounds of refuse, the so-called kitchen middings, which contained 

 quantities of the shells of edible sea molluscs, also bones of mammals which had 

 been split either for the extraction of the marrow or to form implements, had been 

 found along the margins of this beach. In the valley of the Forth the land had 

 been submerged and an arm of the sea had stretched more or less across the island 

 and separated it completely into a part north and one south of the Firth. 



Large whales had frequented the Firth and become stranded. The subsequent 

 elevation of the land converted the ancient bed of the estuary into the 25—30 foot 

 beach, which now forms the fertile Carse of Stirling. Subjacent to the cultivated 

 soil is a deposit of mud, blue silt and clay in which skeletons of large whalebone 

 whales belonging to the genera Balsenoptera and Megaptera have from time to time 

 been founds Alongside of four of these skeletons implements made of the beam 

 of the horn of the red deer were obtained, three of which, chisel-shaped at one end, 

 truncated at the other, were perforated by a hole for the reception of a handle. Of 

 these specimens two, observed in 1819 and 1824, have been lost, but the third,** 

 found in 1877, 11 inches long and 6£ in greatest girth, the hole in which contained 

 a fragment of the original handle (fig. 1), is preserved in the University Museum of 



* Past in the Present, Edinburgh, 1880. 



t Proc. Royal Institution of Great Britain, March 1897 ; Nature, vol. lvii, 1898 ; Ann. Scot. Nat. Hist, 1898. 



I Edinburgh, 1899. More recently in his Munro Lectures On Paleolithic Man, Edinburgh, 1912. 



§ Proc. Scot. Soc. Antiq., vol. xxxix, 1905. 



|| Oxford, 1912. Preliminary papers were published in P.S.Ant.S., vol. xxxviii and xli. 



IT Accounts of their discovery were given by Mr D. Milne Home in his Estuary of the Forth, and more fully 

 by Mr David B. Morris in the Raised Beaches of the Forth Valley, 1892 and 1901. The discovery in 1897 of the 

 Causewayhead whale was described by Mr Morris, for whom I wrote an account of the implements : the specimens 

 are preserved in the Public Museum in Stirling. See also my Marine Mammals in the Anatomical Museum of the 

 University of Edinburgh, 1912. 



** I described this specimen in Reports, Newcastle Meeting British Association, p. 790, 1889. Dr R, Munro 

 figured it in his Preh istorie Scotland, 1899, and I in Marine Mammals in the Anatomical Museum of the University, 1912. 



