History which is derived from written materials must necessarily begin only where civilisation has advanced to so ripe a state, that the songs of the bard, and the traditions of the priest, have ceased to satisfy the cravings of the human mind for mastery over the past and the future. It has been too generally assumed that history is an inconceivable thing independent of written materials. Historians have accordingly, with a transient and incredulous glance at the fabulous infancy of nations, been too frequently content to leave their annals imperfect and maimed of those chapters that should record the deeply interesting story of their origin and rise. This mode of dealing with history is happily no longer sanctioned by the example of the ablest of its modern investigators. They are at length learning to analyze the myths which their predecessors rejected; and the results have already rewarded their toil, though much still remains obscure, or utterly unknown.

Gifted with an inspired pen, Moses has recorded in briefest words the story of the world's infancy: that, therefore, is rendered independent of myth or fable. But quitting that single illuminated spot, how shall the investigator recover the annals of our race during the dubious interval between the era of the dispersion of the human family and the earliest contribution of written materials? Job, we know, was no Hebrew, but a man of Uz, in the land to which Edom succeeded. Could we fix his era, it would be of interest; for we know that he lived in a literate age; and his desire against his adversary was, that he had written a Book! But Biblical students are disagreed as to this epoch. A recent German critic brings it down to the period of the Exodus, while the great majority of commentators have heretofore placed it some 700 years nearer Creation. We must, meanwhile, be content to receive this as one pregnant scene of primitive social life incorporated into the Book of Books, while all the rest are swallowed up with the old centuries to which they belonged. It has to be intercalated as best may be, into its place in the first chapters of human history, ere we grope our way onward or backward, seeking amid the darkness for that historic oasis—the first establishment of the human race on the banks of the Nile.

Wilkinson places the era of Menes, the founder of Egyptian monarchy, and probably one of the earliest wanderers from the eastern cradle of our race, some 2200 years B.C. Bunsen, aiming, in his "Ægyptens Stelle in der Weltgeschichte," at fixing the exact year, assigns that of 3643 B.C., or, in other words, 1295 years before the commonly accepted era of the Deluge. Yet even this has not satisfied all the requisites of newly discovered data. Fleury, in his "L'Egypte Pharaonique," carries back the Menean age some 1600 years farther into the past; and BÖckh, following out an independent series of investigations, fixes the same era, in his "Manetho und die Hundssternperiode," for the year B.C. 5702. The world's early historic chronology, it is now universally admitted, has been misinterpreted. The last date is just 1698 years before the creation of the world, if we are still implicitly to accept Archbishop Usher for our guide. But even this it is possible may yet be revised, as too scanty for the events which it must comprehend; unless, following the example of one distinguished archÆologist, Mr. S. Sharpe, we consign all Egyptian history prior to the era of Osirtesen I. to the same order of fabulous or mythic inventions as the crude traditions of our own chroniclers, and esteem Menes as no more than the classic Saturnus, or the Scandinavian Odin. It is not our province here to do more than indicate the fact, that all early chronology is liable to correction by the contributions of new truths, its most accredited data being at best only approximations to the desired end. "Oblivion is not to be hired. The greater part must be content to be as though they had not been: to be found in the register of God, not in the records of men. Twenty-seven names make up the first story before the Flood, and the recorded names ever since contain not one living century. The number of the dead long exceedeth all that shall live. The night of time far surpasseth the day; and who knows when was the Equinox?"[9]

Similar necessities and difficulties meet us when we would investigate the beginnings of younger nations. The oldest intelligible inscription known in Scotland is that graven in Anglo-Saxon Runes on the Ruthwell Cross, Dumfriesshire, and dating not earlier than the ninth century. The oldest written historic documents are probably the charters of Duncan, engrossed about the year 1035, and still preserved among the muniments of Durham Cathedral. Prior to these the Romans furnish some few scanty notes concerning the barbarian Picti. The Irish annalists contribute brief but valuable additions. The northern sagas, it is now certain, contain a still richer store of early historic notes, which the antiquaries of Copenhagen are busily digesting for us into available materials. Yet, after all these are ransacked, what shall we make of the long era which intervenes between the dispersion of the human family and the peopling of the British Isles? When did the first rude prow touch our shores?—who were its daring crew? Whence did language, manners, nationality, civilisation, and letters spring? All these are questions of the deepest interest; but on nearly all of them history is as silent as on the annals of Chaos. With reverential piety, or with restless inquisitiveness, we seek to know somewhat of the rude forefathers of our island race. Nor need we despair of unveiling somewhat of the mystery of their remote era, though no undeciphered hieroglyphics, nor written materials, preserve one solitary record of the Menes of the British Isles.

Human intelligence and research have already accomplished so much, that ignorance alone can presume to resign any past event to utter oblivion. Between "the Beginning," spoken of in the first verse of the Book called Genesis, and the creation of man, the most humble and devout of Biblical students now acknowledge the intervention of ages, compared to which the whole era of our race is but as the progression of the shadow one degree on the dial of time. Our whole written materials concerning all these ages are comprehended in the few introductory words of the Mosaic narrative, and for well-nigh 6000 years no more was known. But all the while their history lay in legible characters around these generations who heeded them not, or read them wrong. At length this history is being deciphered. The geologist has mastered the characters, and page after page of the old interleaved annals of preadamite existence are being reduced to our enchorial text—to the writing of the people. The dislocated strata are being paged, as it were, and re-arranged in their primary order. The palimpsests are being noted, and their double readings transferred to their correct places in the revised history. The whole accumulations of these ages between Chaos and man are, in fact, being dealt with by modern science much in the same way as the bibliographer treats some monkish or collegiate library suddenly rescued from the dust and confusion of centuries.

Returning to the same book of Moses, called Genesis, we find in it another record of things since the Beginning, thus noted in a passing parenthesis of the sacred narrative: "And God made the stars also." Very brief words; yet these are all our written materials about worlds and suns so filling the azure vault, that the astronomer, scarcely conscious of using figurative language, speaks of nebulous spaces as powdered with stars. Science has added somewhat to our knowledge of these also, without written annals. The Chaldean shepherds, who had never travelled beyond the central plain of Asia, where we recognise the cradle-land of the human race, began the work of unriddling these mysterious records. Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler, added largely, with unassisted vision, to the accumulated observations of astronomy. Galileo supplied a new key that unlocked many secret stores. Huygens, Newton, Herschel, Dollond, Lord Rosse, have each given us others wherewith many more are being opened. Astronomy and geology have both accomplished much, and have yet to accomplish far more ere their scattered leaves can be bound up, or their thousand lacunÆ filled in. Nevertheless, histories, it seems, may be based on other than written materials—may, indeed, be all the more sure and incontrovertible because their evidence is traceable to no such doubtful records.

It is in curious consistency with human nature that we find the order of its investigations in the inverse ratio of their relation to itself. In the infancy of our race men studied the stars, bringing to the aid of their human sympathies the fancies of the astrologer to fill the void which Astronomy could not satisfy. The earth had grown older, and its patriarchal age was long past, when Cosmogony and Geology had their rise. Now at length when the studies of many generations have furnished materials for Astronomy, and the history of the earth's crust is being patiently unravelled by numerous independent labourers, some students of the past have inquired if the annals of our own race may not also be recoverable. Men with zeal no less earnest than that which has done so much for Astronomy and Geology, have found that this also lay around the older generations, recorded in characters no less intelligible, and containing the history of beings no less interesting to us than the Saurians or Mammoths, to whose inheritance we have succeeded. Bacon has remarked, in treating of the vicissitudes of things,[10] "The great winding-sheets that bury all things in oblivion, are two—deluges and earthquakes." But the weft of our historic winding-sheet is of a feebler texture, and its unnoted folds envelop an ampler oblivion, which also will yield secrets worth the knowing. Not a day passes that some fact is not stored in that strange treasury, some of them wittingly, but far more unwittingly, as the chronicles of man. To decipher these and to apply them as the elements of a new historic chronometry, are the legitimate ends of ArchÆology.

Slowly and grudgingly is its true position conceded to the study of the archÆologist. The world has had its laugh at him, not always without reason. The antiquary, indeed, in our own day, has taken the first of the laugh himself, feeling that it was not unmerited, so long as he was the mere gatherer of shreds from the tattered and waste leaves of the past. Now, however, when these same shreds are being pieced together and read anew, it is found that they well repay the labours both of collector and decipherer. But ArchÆology is yet in its infancy. Little more has been done for it than to accumulate and classify a few isolated facts. We are indeed only learning the meaning of the several characters in which its records are engrossed.

The history of one of the oldest and most faithfully studied branches of the science, may afford an example, as well as encouraging assurance, for the whole. In 1636 the learned Jesuit, Father Kirchner, published his "Œdipus Ægyptiacus," a ponderous treatise on Egyptian hieroglyphics, completed in six folios, containing abundance of learning, and no lack of confident assurance, but never a word of truth in the whole. It is a fair specimen of the labours of hieroglyphic students down to the year 1799, when M. Bouchard, a French officer of Engineers, in digging the foundation of Fort St. Julien, on the western bank of the Nile, between Rosetta and the sea, discovered a mutilated block of black basalt, containing three versions of one inscription graven in the year B.C. 196, or 1995 years prior to its discovery. Inscribed in this late era of hieroglyphic literature, Epiphanes, whose accession it records, had decreed it to be graven not only in the hieroglyphic or sacred characters, but also in the enchorial or popular Egyptian writing, and in the Greek character and language. Here then seemed to be the long-coveted key to the mysterious records of Egypt. Casts of it were taken, fac-similes engraved and distributed throughout Europe; and expectation, roused to the utmost pitch of excitement, paused for a reply. But eighteen years elapsed before Dr. Thomas Young, one of the greatest scholars of his age, mastered the riddle of the key, established beyond doubt the alphabetic use of hieroglyphics, and demonstrated the phonetic value of five of its characters. It seems, perhaps, a small result for so long a period of study, during which the attention of many of the first scholars of Europe had been directed to the critical investigation of the inscriptions of the Rosetta stone, and the comparison of their diverse characters. Nevertheless it was the insertion of the point of the wedge. All that followed was easy in comparison with it. What has since been accomplished by the scholars of Europe in this old field of archÆological investigation, where they dealt with written though unread materials, is now being attempted for the whole compass of its legitimate operations by a similar union of learning and zeal, and ArchÆology at length claims its just rank among the inductive sciences.

The visitor to the British Museum passes through galleries containing fossil relics of the secondary and tertiary geological periods—the gigantic evidences of former life, the tropical fauna of the carboniferous system, and all the organic and inorganic proofs by which we are guided in investigating the physical changes, and classifying the extinct beings, that pertained to the older world of which they speak. Thence he proceeds to galleries filled with the inscribed sarcophagi and obelisks, the votive tablets, the sculptured altars, deities, or historic decorations of Assyria, Egypt, India, Greece, and Rome, relics which belong no less to extinct, though newer systems and orders of being. "The antiquities," says an eminent geologist, when instituting a nearly similar comparison, "piece on in natural sequence to the geology; and it seems but rational to indulge in the same sort of reasonings regarding them. They are the fossils of an extinct order of things newer than the tertiary; of an extinct race, of an extinct religion, of a state of society and a class of enterprises which the world saw once, but which it will never see again; and with but little assistance from the direct testimony of history, one has to grope one's way along this comparatively modern formation, guided chiefly, as in the more ancient deposits, by the clue of circumstantial evidence."[11] Such are the reflections of an intelligent geologist, suggested by a similar combination of geological and historic relics to that which offers itself to the visitor of our great National Museum. But it is even in a more absolute sense than the geologist dreams of that the antiquities piece on to the geology, and show the researches of the archÆologist to follow up the closing data of the older systems without a pause. He labours to build up that most important of all the branches of palÆontology which pertains to ethnological investigations, and which when brought to maturity will be found not less valuable as an element in the elucidation of the history of nations and of mankind, than the grammatical construction and the affiliations of languages, which the ethnologist now chiefly favours. The archÆologist applies to the accumulated facts of his own science the same process of inductive reasoning which the geologist has already employed with such success in investigating still earlier states of being. Both deal with unwritten history, and aim at the recovery of annals long deemed irretrievably erased. Nor is it merely in a parallelism of process, or a continuity of subject, that the affinity is traceable between them. It will be found that they meet on common ground, and dispute the heirship of some of old Time's bequests. The detritus records archÆological as well as geological facts. The more recent alluvial strata are the legitimate property of both; while above these lie the evidences of still later changes on the earth's surface—the debris of successive ages, the buried ruins, the entombed works of art, and "the heaps of reedy clay, into which chambered cities melt in their mortality"[12]—the undisputed heirlooms of the archÆologist. The younger science treats, it is true, of recent periods, when compared with the eras of geological computation, and of a race newer than any of those whose organic remains are classified in the systems into which the strata of the earth's crust have been grouped. But this race which last of all has peopled the globe, once teeming with living beings so strangely diverse from all that now inhabit it, is the race of man, whose history embraces nobler records, and has claims to a deeper interest for us than the most wonderful of all the extinct monsters that once

Among the recent contributors to archÆological science, the Danish antiquaries have surpassed all others in the value and extent of their researches. Occupying as they do a comparatively isolated seat of early northern civilisation, where the relics of the primeval and secondary archÆological periods escaped to a great extent the disturbing influences of Roman invasion, they possess many facilities for its study. Notwithstanding this, however, the mute but eloquent relics of antiquity which abound there, excited, until a very recent period, even less notice than they have done among the archÆologists of Ireland and Scotland, where also aboriginal traces have been little modified by the invading legions, whose memorials nearly superseded all others in the southern part of the British Isle. The Scandinavian countries, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, held the chief power among the races of the remote north in early times. Rome scarcely interfered with their growing strength, and left their wild mythology and poetic traditions and myths untinctured by the artificial creed which grew up amid the luxurious scepticism of the conquerors of the world. When the flood-tide of the legionary invaders had given back, and left the scenes of their brief occupation like the waste lands of a forsaken shore, the Scandinavians were the first to step into their deserted conquests. Fearlessly navigating seas where no Roman galley dared to have sailed, the Scandinavian warriors conquered the coasts of the Baltic and the German Ocean, occupied many parts of the British Isles, and especially established permanent settlements in the north of Scotland, and the isles on its northern and western coasts. Their power was felt on the shores of France and Spain, and they retaliated even on Italy the unavenged wrongs of the north. America was visited and partially occupied by them fully three centuries before Columbus steered his venturous course across the Atlantic. Greenland was colonized by them, and Iceland became the central point in their system of maritime operations. In that remote island the old northern language still lives, dialects of which were anciently spoken among the Scandinavian races, including the Anglo-Saxons of the south, and the Norsemen of the Scottish mainland and the Northern Isles.

Enduring traces of these hardy colonists still remain to furnish evidence of the source of much of our national character and hereditary customs. The religion of the Angles, the Saxons, the Scottish Norsemen, the Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish Scandinavians, was similar. Christianity, which supplanted so much else, could not root out the memorials of their wild creed, which preserve in the names of the days of the week those of Tyr, Woden, Thur, and Frea, favourite deities of the Scandinavian mythology. In Iceland a large portion of the literature of this northern race still survives, in the form of mythic songs, sagas, laws, and other historic treasures. To this the attention of Danish and Norwegian antiquaries is now devoted with untiring enthusiasm, and already we are possessed of some of its fruits. These are of immense value to all the nations allied to the common stock, and among them Scotland ranks more directly than any other portion of the British Isles. The promised contribution by the antiquaries of Copenhagen to the written materials of history, of the "Antiquitates BritannicÆ et HibernicÆ," cannot fail to add a historic era to early Scottish annals, richer in suggestive interest even than the romantic chronicles of the long lost "Vinland," by which, in their "Antiquitates AmericanÆ," they have added three centuries to the history of the new world.

A mingled race now occupies Britain, diverse in name, and still distinct in blood. The names of England and Scotland, however, contradict the character of the races. While the natives of the South retain the name of Angul, the father of the Scandinavian colonists, long since nearly superseded by Germano-Teutonic races, the Celtic Highlanders, and the Lowlanders of the North, alike take that of the Irish Scoti, the conquerors of the older CeltÆ; though there is not wanting evidence to show, that the peculiar characteristics of the hardy Lowland race, including those of the whole north-eastern mainland, and the Northern Isles, are chiefly derived from the mingled Norse and Saxon blood of a Teutonic ancestry. But older races than the Scandinavian Vikings were colonists of the British Isles. Christianity has failed to obliterate the traces of the creed of Woden. Still less influential have been the modifications of Teutonic and Scandinavian dialects in supplanting the older Celtic names which cling to every hill, valley, and stream, though the Celtic race has, for nearly eight centuries, ceased to occupy aught but the north-western Highlands of Wales and Scotland. The ethnologist has yet to solve the problem as to whether there exist not among these traces of still older tongues, pertaining to races who have left other but no less certain memorials of their former presence. From the remotest era to which historical tradition points, the CeltÆ are found in possession of the north-west of Europe, whither they appear to have been gradually driven, by successive migrations of younger races from the same eastern centre, to which we refer the origin of the whole human family. We can trace, by unmistakable indications, the gradual western migration of this people, until we find them hemmed in between the younger races and the sea, on the north-west coasts of France, and along the mountainous regions of the west in the British Isles, where the invaders of the more fertile regions of the low countries have not cared to follow them. Modern philologists discover a clear affinity between the Celtic dialects and the languages known by the general title of Indo-European, affording confirmation of that eastern origin assigned to them, both by tradition and history, but which is no less true of the newer races which supplanted them. The essential differences between these remain markedly distinguishable after centuries of peaceful intercourse, and a common interchange of rights and privileges. The Scottish Gael, though by no means to be now regarded as sprung from a pure Celtic stock, scarcely differs more widely in language than in moral and intellectual characteristics from the race that peoples the fertile Lowlands. Yet the names of the most remarkable Lowland localities prove their possession by a Celtic race, whom therefore we cannot doubt to have been the prior, if not the aboriginal, occupants of the soil.

Of late years the direct evidence of the character of the primitive races of Europe, furnished by their sepulchral remains, has been made the subject of careful investigation by distinguished ethnologists, both of Denmark and Sweden. Eschricht, Nillson, and Retzius, have all aimed by this means to recover the traces of the colonists of the north of Europe, and have discovered different physical types, apparently corresponding to the successive stages of advancement in civilisation, which the more direct archÆological evidence establishes. Arguing from these results, Professor Nillson arrives at the conclusion that the northern relics of the Stone Period are not the memorials of the CeltÆ, but of a much older and unknown race, which in the course of time has disappeared before the immigration of more powerful nations. Similar ideas are now generally gaining ground among ethnologists. "Within their own pale," Dr. Latham remarks, "the Celts were the encroaching family of the oldest, the Romans of the next oldest, and the Anglo-Saxons and Slavonians of the recent periods of history."[13] On like grounds to those by which Professor Nillson arrives at the conclusion that the CeltÆ were preceded in the north by other races, Danish and Swedish ethnologists concur in rejecting the idea of the Fins having been the aboriginal race of Scandinavia. The earliest people, whose remains are found accompanied with the primitive class of implements, prior to the introduction of metals, appear to have belonged to a family of different physical character from those of any of the Arian races, and have been supposed to present features of greater affinity to the nations of Northern Asia. Professor Nillson, who has carefully examined the skeletons of the aboriginal Swedish colonists, and especially noted the conformation of their crania, states that they are readily distinguished from all the subsequent inhabitants of Scandinavia. They present the same peculiar form of cranium which has been recognised as existing among several ancient peoples, such as the Iberians or Basques of the Pyrenees, the Lapps and Samoyedes, and the Pelasgi, some traces of whom are still found in Greece.[14] The last noted coincidence is of considerable interest, both from the ancient prevalence there of cyclopean architecture, and other traces of primitive arts of unknown antiquity, and also from its vicinity to the Asiatic centre of aboriginal emigration. Dr. Latham remarks, in reply to the question, "Is there reason to believe that any definite stock or division of our species has become either wholly extinct, or so incorporated as to be virtually beyond the recognition and analysis of the investigator? With the vast majority of the so-called extinct stocks, this is not the case; e.g., it is not the case with the old Gauls of Gallia, who, though no longer extant, have extant congeners—the Welsh and Gaels. To an extinction of this kind among the better known historic nations of Europe and Asia, the nearest approach is to be found in the history of the Pelasgi."[15] It will be of no slight interest if we can trace the congeners of this ancient people among the extinct aborigines of the north of Europe.

Two later races are supposed to have succeeded each other in Scandinavia prior to its colonization by the true Swea race, the first settlement of which in Scandinavia Professor Nillson assigns to a much more recent date than has been commonly supposed—probably some time in the sixth century. Mr. Worsaae justly remarks, in his "Primeval Antiquities of Denmark,"—"It is a vain error to assume that certain races must incontestably be the most ancient, because they are the first which are mentioned in the few and uncertain written records which we possess."[16] Unfortunately extremely little attention has been hitherto paid to the size and form of the crania found in British tumuli. Some few examples, however, have been preserved, and will furnish the elements of a brief inquiry into this interesting department of Physical ArchÆology, in a subsequent chapter. To this branch of evidence it is probable that much greater importance will be attached when it has been thoroughly investigated, since to it we may look, with considerable confidence, for a distinct reply to the inquiry, which other departments of archÆological evidence suggest as to the existence of primitive races in Britain prior to the CeltÆ. So far as our present limited data admit of general conclusions being drawn, we find traces of more than one race, differing greatly in physical characteristics from any of the successive colonists of Britain within the era of authentic history. Professor Nillson is of opinion that the type of the old Celtic cranium is intermediate to the true dolicho-kephalic and brachy-kephalic forms, a conclusion in which Dr. Thurnam and others concur. Such is not the form of cranium of either of the races of the Scottish tumuli, and in so far, therefore, as such forms may be assumed to be permanent, we are necessarily led to the conclusion, that in these we recover traces of the Allophylian pioneers of the human family in Britain.

The infancy of all written history is necessarily involved in fable. Long ere the scattered families have conjoined their patriarchal unions into tribes and clans, acknowledging some common chief, and submitting their differences to the rude legislation of the arch-priest or civil head of the commonwealth, treacherous tradition has converted the story of their birth into the wildest admixture of myth and legendary fable. To unravel the complicated skein, and recover the pure thread divested of all its extraneous acquisitions, is the impossible task of the historian. This period past—so momentous in the influence it exercises on all the years that follow—the historian finds himself among materials more manageable in some respects, though not always more trustworthy. He reaches the era of chronicles, records, and, still better, of diplomas, charters, deeds of gift, and the like honest documents, which being written with no thought of posterity by their compilers, are the only really trustworthy chronicles that posterity has inherited. This historic epoch of Scotland is involved in even more obscurity than that which clouds the dim and fabulous morning of most nations. We have indeed the few but invaluable allusions of Roman authors supplying important and generally trustworthy data. But it is only a momentary glimpse of sunshine. For the era succeeding we have little better than the perplexing admixture of traditions, facts, and pious legends of monkish chroniclers, furnished with a copiousness sufficiently characteristic of the contrast between the literary legionary of imperial Rome, and the cloistered soldier of her papal successor. Amid these dusty acres of parchment must we glean for older dynasties and monarchical pedigrees—not seldom tempted to abandon the weedy furrows in disgust or despair. It is with no lack of zeal or courage, however, that these soldiers of the Church have encountered the oblivious past into which we still peer with no less resolute inquisitiveness. Bede, Fordun, Wyntoun, Boece, and the other penmen of the cloisters who, more or less accurately, chronicled contemporary history, all contributed their quota to the thick mists of fable which obscure the earlier annals of the country. Wyntoun, the best of our Scottish chroniclers, following the example of other monkish historians, begins his work as near the beginning as may be, with a treatise on angels, before proceeding to "manny's fyrst creatoune!" In the sixth chapter he gets the length of "Ye Arke of Noe, and of the Spate," and after treating of Ynde, Egype, Afryk, and many other lands with an enviable and leisurely composure, he at length reaches the threshold of his legitimate subject, and glances, in the thirteenth chapter of his Scottish Chronicles, at "how Bretanne and Irlande lyis." This, however, is a mere passing notice; nor is it till after the dedication of many more successive chapters of his first five books to the general history of the world, that the author of the "Orygynale Cronykil of Scotland" quits his ample theme, and devotes himself exclusively to the professed object of his investigation, with only such occasional deviations as might be expected from an ecclesiastical historian.

With such laborious chroniclers peering into the past, which lay fully five centuries nearer them than it does to us, there might seem little left for the men of this older generation to do. But unhappily the very best of monkish chroniclers must be consulted with caution even as contemporary historians, and scarcely at all as the recorders of what passed any length of time prior to their own day; their information being nearly as trustworthy in regard to Noah and his spate, as to the traditions of generations immediately preceding their own. Lord Hailes begins his annals with the accession of Malcolm Canmore, "because the history of Scotland previous to that period is involved in obscurity and fable." Tytler, with even less courage than Lord Hailes, commences only at the accession of Alexander the Third, "because it is at this period that our national annals become particularly interesting to the general reader."

Till recently, the never-failing apology for all obscurities and deficiencies in Scottish history, has been the rape of our muniments by Edward and Cromwell. The former spoliation supplied for some centuries an excuse for all degrees of ignorance, inconsistencies, or palpable blunders; and the latter came most conveniently to hand for more recent dalliers in the same pleasant field of historic rambling. Edward and Cromwell both contributed a helping hand to the obscurity of Scottish history, in so far as they carried off and destroyed national records which could ill be spared. The apology, however, has been worth far more to maundering manufacturers of history than the lost muniments were ever likely to have proved. Not a few of these irrecoverable national records, so long deplored, it begins to be shrewdly suspected, never had any existence. Many more of them, it is found, were not sought for, or they might have been discovered to have never left their old repositories. Diligent Scottish antiquaries, finding this hereditary wail over lost muniments a very profitless task, have of late years betaken themselves to the study of what remained, and have been rewarded by the recovery of chest-loads of dusty charters and deeds of all sorts, of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, containing mines of historic information. The Scottish chartularies, now printed by various Clubs of literary antiquaries, disclose to us information scarcely open to a doubt, concerning old laws, feudal customs, servitude, tenure of property, ecclesiastical corporate rights, the collision of lay and clerical interests, and the final transference of monastic lands to lay proprietors. The old apology, therefore, of muniments lost or destroyed, will no longer serve the Scottish historian. Imperfectly as these treasures have yet been turned to account, medieval history is no longer obscure. Many fallacies are already exploded, and many more must speedily follow. The legends of the old chroniclers must be tried by the tests of documents written sometimes by the same authors, but with no thought that history would ever question them for the truth.

Yet ample as is the field thus open to the literary antiquary, these will only partially satisfy earnest longings after a knowledge of the past, and a clue to the old ancestral chain whereof they are but the middle links. Ritson has already carried back the supposed limits of authentic Caledonian history fully a thousand years before the obscurity that daunted Lord Hailes. Chalmers, Gregory, Skene, and other zealous investigators, have followed or emulated him in the same bold inquiry. But neither do they reach the BEGINNING which we still desiderate. Much obscurity indeed vanishes. We begin to discover that the Northern and Southern Picts, so long the subject of mystery and fable, were no other than the aboriginal CeltÆ; while the Scots who founded the kingdom of Dalriada, in Argyleshire, and ultimately conferred their name on the whole races occupying ancient Caledonia, were probably, if not indeed certainly, only another branch of the same Celtic race, who so readily amalgamated with the older occupants of Caledonia, that the change which is known as the "Scottish Conquest" long puzzled the historian, from the absence of any defined traces of a progress at all commensurate with its results. This is somewhat gained on the medieval beginning which could alone be previously held tenable. But this also begins in the wake of much progression, and glances at a period which likewise had its old history full of no less interest to us, could its annals be recovered.

In one of the few records of Sir Isaac Newton's reflections which he has left for the help of others, the following comprehensive thought occurs:—"It is clearly apparent that the inhabitants of this world are of a short date, seeing that all arts, as letters, ships, printing, needle, &c., were discovered within the memory of history." The reflection is surely a very pregnant one. The data it suggests to us as the landmarks of time are well worth extending and turning to account, if so be that with their aid we can arrive at some trustworthy system of chronology, whereby to travel back towards that date which we reckon to be the beginning of things.

In this inquiry the labours of the literary antiquary, however zealously pursued, will but little avail us in reaching the desired point. The antiquary, nevertheless, has been long familiar with the elements of this older history, though turning them to very much the same profitable account as, till a very recent period, he did the hieroglyphic records graven on the granite tablets along the Nile. The first of arts mentioned by Newton is letters; justly first in point of dignity and universal value. Far homelier arts, however, sufficed the primitive races of mankind. Humble were their wants, and limited their desires; and if we are justified by the records of creation preserved to us in the Mosaic narrative, in assuming that man, beginning with the woven garment of fig-leaves and the coat of skins, has slowly progressed through successive stages to the knowledge of nobler arts, and the higher wants of an intelligent being, then we have only to establish evidence of the most primitive arts, pertaining to the primeval race, in order to be assured that we have reached the true beginning at which we aim. In the general investigation, indeed, allowance must be made for the speedy loss of antediluvian metallurgic arts which would follow almost of necessity on the exodus of the primitive nomades from their Eastern birthland, though preserved perhaps by the founders of the first Asiatic kingdoms, and probably practised by the earliest colonists of the Nile valley. Such at least we shall find to have been the case with the primeval colonists of Britain.

This point it is at which the modern archÆologist now directs his inquiries, not altogether without the anticipation that these same primitive arts, the product of the beginning of things, may also prove to contain a decipherable alphabet, which may be resolved into definite phonetics, and furnish the key to many inscriptions no less curious and valuable than the parchments of medieval charter-chests, or even the tablet of Abydos and the Rosetta Stone.

It is long since the evidences of a primitive state of society, still abounding in the midst of modern civilisation, attracted the attention of the antiquary. It was indeed almost a necessary consequence of the accumulation of large collections of antiquities. The private hoards of "nick nackets,"—including in general a miscellaneous assortment of relics of all ages, only sufficient to produce a confused notion of useless or obsolete arts, without creating a definite idea of any single era of the past,—may be aptly compared to the disjecta membra of some beautifully-proportioned and decorated vase. Hoarded apart, the pieces are nearly without value, and to new possessors become even meaningless. But should the whole, by some fortunate chance, be re-assembled in a single collection, it becomes possible for a skilful manipulator to piece the fragments together, and replace them with an elegant and valuable work of art. Thus it has proved with more than one archÆological museum. In 1780 the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland was established, and its collection of national antiquities begun. A brief but most suggestive paper, read at one of its meetings in 1782, and published in the first volume of its Transactions, shews the speedy results of such valuable reconstructions, by means of an intelligent comparison of the primitive relics of Scotland.[17] But the resources of private zeal proved inadequate to the effective pursuit of these researches into Scottish ArchÆology, and the national funds found other, though not always more valuable objects for their expenditure. The hint was lost, but the accumulation of materials for future students was happily not altogether abandoned.

"About forty years ago," says J. J. A. Worsaae, the eminent Danish antiquary, writing in 1846, "the general character of scientific pursuits was in our country (Denmark) much the same as in most other parts of Europe. Great pains were spent in collecting all sorts of objects illustrating the changes of the globe upon which we live, and the distribution and habits of animals and plants—in short, all the departments of Natural History; whilst, strange to say, people for the most part neglected traces of men, the remains not only of their own ancestors, but also of all the different races who have been spread over the world. The antiquities, with the exception of those of Roman and Greek origin, were regarded as mere curiosities, without any scientific value."[18] Notwithstanding all the zeal of British archÆologists of late years, so much of this spirit still remains among us, that it would be easier, perhaps, even now, to secure the purchase by the Trustees of the British Museum, of a Roman statue or an Egyptian tablet, than of valuable relics of British antiquity.

One man has within the last thirty years accomplished, not for Denmark only, but for Europe, what the whole united labours of earlier archÆologists failed to do. About the year 1815, the present Danish Councillor of State, C. J. Thomsen, the son of a merchant of Copenhagen, was appointed Secretary of a Royal Commission for the preservation and collection of national antiquities. It had then been in existence some seven or eight years, and the whole result of its labours was a few miscellaneous articles, unclassified and uncared for, lying in a small room of the University Library. His enthusiasm in the study of the antiquities of his country surmounted all obstacles. He had to contend alike with the theories of the scholar and the prejudices of the unlearned. But he had succeeded to a position of the utmost value to a man of energy and enthusiasm. From the first he had grants (though exceedingly small ones) of public money at his disposal. He soon enlisted the more important element of public sympathy, and nationality of feeling, in his pursuits. His little room became too small for accumulating purchases and donations. A suite of apartments was yielded, at his intercession, in the Royal Palace of Christiansborg; and as the varied collection increased in his hands, he found himself possessed at once of the space and the elements for systematic classification.

The Royal Museum of Northern Antiquities of Copenhagen now numbers between three and four thousand specimens of stone weapons and implements, some hundreds of bronze swords, celts, spear-heads, armillÆ, torcs, &c., and a collection of native gold and silver relics unequalled in all the museums of Europe. To it we owe the valuable suggestion of the system of classification now universally adopted in the nomenclature of archÆological science—the Stone, Bronze, and Iron periods, which, simple as it may appear, was first suggested by Mr. Thomsen, and is justly esteemed the foundation of ArchÆology as a science. By means of it the whole materials of antiquarian study at once arrange themselves according to an intelligible chronology of universal acceptance, and adapted in an especial degree to Northern antiquities. This, therefore, is the system on which the following data are arranged, subject only to such modifications as seem naturally to arise from national or local peculiarities.

It is not necessary here to enter on the question, of curious interest and value, as to whether the primeval state of man was essentially one of barbarism, from whence he progressed by slow degrees to social union, arts, civilisation, and political organisation into communities and nations. The investigations of chronologists the further they are pursued, seem only the more certainly to confer on primitive civilisation a more remote antiquity. At the same time, they confirm the idea, that the long accepted chronology of Archbishop Usher, still attached to our English Bibles, cheats the world, at the lowest computation, of fully 1400 years of its existence—a trifle perhaps in the age of worlds, but no unimportant element in the history of human civilisation, when we remember that between the era of the Mosaic deluge and the accession of the Egyptian Menes, we must account for the peopling of Egypt, the establishment of its social and political constitution, and the founding of a civilisation, the monuments of which are still among the most wonderful that human intellect and labour have produced. Not the least important branch of this inquiry relates to the primeval inhabitants of our own quarter of the globe; of whom as yet we know only with any degree of certainty of the CeltÆ, occupying a transitional place in the history of the human family—at once the earliest known intruders and the latest nomades of Europe. It seems probable, from all the traces we can recover of the original condition of this race, that it was more their deficiency than their excess in the energy which we expect to find in the colonists of new regions, that drove them onward in their north-western pilgrimage, until their course was arrested by the Atlantic barriers. They seem to have fled ever forward, like night before the dawn, carrying with them knowledge sufficient to cope with the savage occupants of the wilds they invaded, yet bearing into these few arts but such as still pertain to the primitive races of mankind. In older literary notices of this people, whose language, manners, and arts are still traceable in our own land, we have only a secondary interest, believing that some records of them are recoverable, noted for us long before they had excited foreign interest. But, still more, we doubt not that similar records also preserve the history of older British tribes, in comparison with which the ancient CeltÆ must be regarded as of recent origin. "The antiquities of the earlier periods," says a distinguished English antiquary, "including all remains which bear no evident stamp of Roman origin or influence, claim our most careful investigation. Exceedingly limited in variety of types, these vestiges of the ancient inhabitants of Great Britain are not more interesting to the antiquarian collector on account of their rarity, than valuable to the historian. They supply the only positive evidence in those obscure ages, regarding customs, warfare, foreign invasions, or the influence of commerce, and the advance of civilisation amongst the earliest races by which these islands were peopled."[19] Perhaps when we have bestowed on these primitive remains the degree of careful investigation which they merit, we shall find the variety of types less limited than is now conceived to be the case. The archÆologists of Denmark justly value the absence of all relics of Roman art and civilisation, from the confidence it has given to their researches into the true eras to which their own primeval antiquities belong. Such gratulations, however, can only be of temporary avail. The influence of Roman arts and arms furnishes an element in the civilisation of modern Europe too important not to be worthy of the most careful study. When the distinctive characteristics of Roman and primitive art have been so satisfactorily established as to admit of their separate classification without risk of error or confusion, the British collections, with their ample store of Anglo-Roman relics, will furnish a far more comprehensive demonstration of national history than those northern galleries, which must remain destitute of any native examples of an influence no less abundantly visible in their literature and arts, than in that of nations which received it directly from the source. In this respect the Scottish antiquary is peculiarly fortunate in the field of observation he occupies. While he possesses the legionary inscriptions, the sepulchral tablets, the sculptures, pottery, and other native products of Roman colonists or invaders, he has also an extensive and strictly defined field for the study of primitive antiquities, almost as perfectly free from the disturbing elements of foreign art as the most secluded regions of ancient Scandinavia.

[1] Carlyle's Miscellanies, second edition, vol. v. p. 301.