ts of Banffshire and
Aberdeen; though before the introduction of iron into the country they
seem to have been well known all over the north of Scotland. I have
never yet seen a stone arrow-head found in any of the northern
localities, that had not been fashioned out of this hard and splintery
substance,--a sufficient proof that our ancestors, ere they had formed
their first acquaintance with the metals, were intimately acquainted
with at least the mechanical properties of the chalk-flint, and knew
where in Scotland it was to be found. They were mineralogists enough,
too, as their stone battle-axes testify, to know that the best
tool-making rock is the axe-stone of Werner; and in some localities they
must have brought their supply of this rather rare mineral from great
distances. A history of those arts of savage life, as shown in the
relics of our earlier antiquities, which the course of discovery sereved
thoroughly to supplant, but which could not have been carried on without
a knowledge of substances and qualities afterwards lost, until
re-discovered by scientific curiosity, would form of itself an
exceedingly curious chapter. The art of the gun-flint maker (and it,
too, promises soon to pass into extinction) is unquestionably a curious
one, but not a whit more curious or more ingenious than the art
possessed by the rude inhabitants of our country eighteen hundred years
ago, of chipping arrow-heads with an astonishing degree of neatness out
of the same stubborn material. They found, however, that though flint
made a serviceable arrow-head, it was by much too brittle for an adze or
battle-axe; and sought elsewhere than among the Banffshire gravels for
the rock out of which these were to be wrought. Where they found it in
our northern provinces I have not yet ascertained. It is but a short
time since I came to know that they were beforehand with me in the
discovery of the bituminous jet of the Lower Old Red Sandstone, and were
excavators among its fossiliferous beds. The vitrified forts of the
north of Scotland give evidence of yet another of the obsolete arts.
Before the savage inhabitants of the country were ingenious enough to
know the uses of mortar, or were furnished with tools sufficiently hard
and solid to dress a bit of sandstone, they must have been acquainted
with the _chemical_ fact, that with the assistance of fluxes, a pile of
stones could be fused into a solid wall, and with the _mineralogical_
fact, that t