PREHISTORIC ANNALS OF SCOTLAND.*
ALL history derived from written materials carries us but a little way back into the past. Before the history of each race begins there is always a period which has either been passed over alto- gether, or filled up by men, in their abhorrence of a vacuum, with myth and fable. But there has long been a growing disposition to question whether our knowledge of the past must necessarily stop at the point where writings fail us—whether it be not possible to grope our way a little further back into the darkness of prehistoric times ; and when once the attempt was fairly made, it was found that the darkness was not altogether so intense, or the footpath so untraceable. The generations that * Prehistoric Annals of Scotland. By Daniel Wilson, LL.D. second Edition. TWO vole. Macmillan and Co., London and Cambridge. 1868. passed away before letters were known have not left them- selves wholly without a record. The rocks, if duly questioned, have a story to tell of them,—brief and fragmentary, it is true, leaving much unsaid that we would gladly learn ; but, neverthe- less, as far as it goes, implicitly to be trusted. " The process by which the rocks have been built up," to quote Dr. Wilson, " with their countless records of pre-existent life, continued uninter- ruptedly after the advent of man. The post tertiary strata are rich with the chroniclings of human story. To decipher these, and to apply them as the elements of a new historic chronometry, are the legitimate ends of archreology." It is by its recognition, it must be confessed somewhat tardy, of this task as its end, that archaeology is at last winning its right to be regarded as a science. As long as the antiquary confined himself to making collections of " curiosities,' without any attempt at giving them their proper place in the archaeological series, his pursuit might be looked on as a harmless method of spending time, but could have no scientific -value.
The first edition of the Prehistoric Annals of Scotland appeared in 1851, since which time great progress has been made, both in archaeological research itself, and in establishing its relations with the more immediately cognate sciences. This has necessa- rily involved extensive changes in the details of the work before us. Moreover, that opinion as to the antiquity of man, which twenty years ago was held but as a conjecture by some few philosophers, and received, when hesitatingly put forward, with incredulous wonder or ridicule, has through modern investi- gations been gradually forcing itself as a conviction on the majority of scientific men, and it is now almost universally admitted that we must antedate the appearance of man upon 'this earth by a period of many thousands of years. " In the drift gravel of France and England," says Dr. Wilson, " have been found by hundreds the flint implements which reveal the 'presence of man in immediate juxtaposition with the bones of the fossil mastodon and rhinoceros." The change which has been wrought in opinion on this head, he rightly thinks, will procure a much more ready attention for the proofs he brings forward as establishing the existence of races in Great Britain prior to the -Celtse, who were found there at the comparatively modern era of the Roman invasion.
Great credit is undoubtedly due to Dr. Wilson for the labour -and pains bestowed on these volumes. As far as we can judge, he seems to have overlooked nothing that could throw a light on his .1-subject, and scrupulously to abstain from pushing his theories further than his facts warrant. At the same time, we miss in him, as in most men of science (them are some brilliant exceptions, as Mr. Darwin), an adequate appreciation of the advantages of logical 'method. There is a confusion about the book which, to some -extent, mars the due effect of the information with which it teems. It is from no undue national zeal that Dr. Wilson has been led to bestow this attention on the remains of primitive -races in Scotland, but from the conviction that they only can be -effectually studied in those outlying districts which were but partially affected by the great wave of Roman conquest. Thus
'be says :—
" Of a comprehensive system of antehistorical research the archteo- logy of Scotland forms the merest fractional item. It is indispensable, however, for the integrity of the whole, and as I believe that it is not at Babylon or Nimrud, but in the northern steppes of Asia, that the primaeval history of the Elder Continent must be sought ; so, also, it is not in the annals of Greece or Rome, or in the antiquities of the most ancient historical regions, modified by their arts and arms ; but in Ireland, Scotland, in the Scandinavian countries, and in Switzerland, that we may hope to recover the unadulterated first chapters of Euro- pean history." (Vol. II., p. 532.)
Dr. Wilson divides his work into four books, treating respec- tively of the antiquities of the Stone period, the Archaic or Bronze period, the Iron period, and the Ecclesiastical antiquities. This system of classification we owe to the Danish archaeologists, to whose antiquities it is especially suitable ; but it has been generally adopted as furnishing, when not forced beyond its legitimate application, an intelligible order of succession, according to which the materials of antiquarian research arrange them- selves. In the first, or Stone period, the use of metals seems to have been entirely unknown. Of this the weapons, tools, and ornaments of flint and stone which have been found in large quantities iu so many places ar•e a proof; for it cannot be supposed -that races who understood the art of smelting ore would by prefer- -mace make use of such an inferior substance as flint for swords and- spear-heads. In the next, or Bronze, period a step in advance had
been made. Whether by natural progress, or, as is more likely, by tt\ the intrusion of an alien race, the primitive inhabitants of Britain had learnt the art of smelting the copper ore, and combining nail it the due proportion of tin to form the alloy called bronze, thongh still ignorant how to dearwith the more serviceable, more widely diffused, but far less ductile iron ore. In the third, or Iron, period we find that the full mastery over all the metals has at last been attained, and weapons and implements of stone or bronze hence- forth disappear. How long a duration we are to assign to the Stone period is, of course, a question of much uncertainty. The Danish antiquarians give to theirs a lapse of 0,000 years ; but reoent investigations of the Pfahlbauten or lacusaiue habita- tions of Switzerland tend to suggest for the European Stone period a much longer duration. We have no means of fixing the date of man's first intrusion upon Scotland, but the following fact, among many similar, will show that we are justified in as- suming his presence there at a very remote epoch :—Of late years, in the course of excavations in the Blair-Drummond moss, on the shores of the Firth of Forth, there have been found, at the height of twenty-five feet above the present sea level, the skele- tons of several whales, together with lances of deer's horn, which had evidently been used as rude harpoons. " In this case," as Dr. 1"1, ilson remarks :— " We have the slow silting up of the estuary preceding or accom- panying the upheaval of the original bed of the sea, with the imbedded skeletons of halals) and the evidence of the contemporaneous presence • of man. Nor was it till the bed of the ancient estuary bad been spread out as carse land, channelled by the winding Forth, that the Roman legionaries left their footprints on the soil. The great extent of the changes wrought on this locality by the combined process of upheaval, the filling up of the ancient estuary, and the growth of the peat, only become fully apparent when we further note the discovery of the bones of another whale at Dunmore rock, nearly forty feet above the sea level, while the alluvial silt of the district is in some places 100 foot deep." (VoL L, p. 49.) Before concluding his account of the antiquities of the Stone period, Dr. Wilson discusses the following question :—Assuming that at B.C. 55 and A.D. 83, the dates of the Roman invasions of England and Scotland, the inhabitants of both localities were essentially Celtic, what are the probabilities in favour of -their being the lineal descendants of the monoxylous boat- builders of the Forth and Clyde, the primitive whalers of the Carse of Stirling, or the flint-workers of Elmore, in Suffolk ? He decides that there is no evidence beyond the fact that the Briton and Caledonian were the oldest insular races known to us till recent investigations revealed the traces of older own.- pantR, compared with whom the Celtic Britons of Roman times were altogether modern. For all these primitive nations Dr•. Prichard suggested the convenient name of " Allopbylian," at once characterizing them from the historical and classified races, without assuming for them any hypothetical origin. By an ex- amination of the skulls found in ancient sepulchral cairns and tumuli, we are led to the conclusion that at any rate two races, distinguished by an essentially different cranial conformation, occupied Britain prior to the appearance of the Celtse. The first was characterized by a peculiarly formed head and face ; a narrow, receding forehead, and small under-jaw ; a skull of great length and narrowness, tending to such a tapering prolongation both in the occiput and frontal region as suggested the appellation of "Kumbecephalic," or "boat-shaped," for the race. They were in sufficient numbers to be capable of the combined labour requisite for the construction of vast chambered cairns or barrows. Their architecture has all the rude but massive simplicity of Megalithic art; and the only works of art found in their sepulchres are the bone and flint implements and the rude pottery of the Stone period. This Kumbecephalic race was not apparently altogether ignorant, at some period of their• presence in Britain, of another essentially different from them in craniological characteristics. This second race, from "its pro- minent parietal tubers and truncated occiput," is called the Brachycephalic. The discovery of their• crania in certain of the chambered long barrows suggests, indeed, -their occupy- ing servile relations to the long-headed builders. But when we pass to a later, though still prehistoric era, in which the first traces of metallurgic arts appear, the Kumbe- cephalic race has passed away, and the simpler round earth barrows and small Mats reveal only the Brachy cephalic cranium. These Brachycephali of the British Isles appear to have been in as barbarous a condition as the rudest nomades of the American forests, ignorant for the most part of the very knowledge of metals, or at best in the earliest stage of metallurgic art. Looking to the characteristics of the Celtic languages, and their relations to the great Aryan family, which prove their branching off from the Indo-European stock subsequent to the development of numerals, and many terms of art common to all, the first of
the Aryan colonists of Europe seem to be very inadequately re- presented by the Brachycepliali of the British Stone period, and craniological evidence tends to confirm this doubt. It is fur more probable, Dr. Wilson thinks, that the Celtas of Britain intruded on the second Allophylian or Brachycephalic race long prior to the dawn of definite history, introducing among them the higher arts of the Aryan races, and intermingling with them to fully as great an extent as the later intermixture of Celtic, Saxon, and Danish blood.
Space forbids us from atte:npting an examination of Dr. Wilson's equally elaborate account of the remaining periods. He is a firm believer in Cornwall and Devon being the Cassiterides of Herodotus, and iu the direct intercourse of Pliceuicia with this region iu the very earliest times —probably when it was inhabited by the Allophylian Brachycepliali of the Archaic or Bronze period, herein going against the authority of the late Sir G. C. Lewis, though he, it is said, saw reason before his death for somewhat modifying the incredulity on this point expressed in his " Astronomy of the Ancients." But he thinks the inhabitants of Cornwall and Devon need not be supposed to have been indebted to foreign teachers for their earliest attempts at metallurgy. The use of iron lie seems inclined to attribute to the Celtte. Of course, where so little is known, dogmatic assertion is altogether out of place ; but we already have made some progress in dispelling the thick cloud of darkness that formerly brooded_ over these primitive ages, and the exertions of such men as Dr. Wilson bid fair to do yet more to bring before us states of society so unlike anything in our experience that we can hardly realize that they existed on our own planet, and that the men who lived in them were of the same race as ourselves.
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