day, the
exact compartment which a fire occupied could not be distinguished, at
the distance of half a mile, from its neighboring compartments, and not
at all by night, at any distance, from even the compartments farthest
removed from it. Who, for instance, at the distance of a dozen miles or
so, could tell whether the flame that shone out in the darkness, when
all other objects around it were invisible, was kindled on the east or
west end of an eminence little more than a hundred yards in length? Nay,
who could determine,--for such is the requirement of the
hypothesis,--whether it rose from a compartment of the summit a hundred
feet distant from its west or east end, or from a compartment merely
ninety or a hundred and ten feet distant from it? The supposed signal
system, added to the mere beacon hypothesis, is palpably untenable.

The theory of Williams, however, which is, I am inclined to think, the
true one in the main, seems capable of being considerably modified and
improved by the hypothesis of Sir George. The hill-fort,--palpably the
most primitive form of fortalice or stronghold originated in a
mountainous country,--seems to constitute man's first essay towards
neutralizing, by the art of fortification, the advantages of superior
force on the side of an assailing enemy. It was found, on the discovery
of New Zealand, that the savage inhabitants had already learned to erect
exactly such hill-forts amid the fastnesses of that country as those
which were erected two thousand years earlier by the Scottish aborigines
amid the fastnesses of our own. Nothing seems more probable, therefore,
than that the forts of eminences such as Craig Phadrig and Knock Farril,
originally mere inclosures of loose, uncemented stones, may belong to a
period not less ancient than that of the first barbarous wars of
Scotland, when, though tribe battled with tribe in fierce warfare, like
the red men of the West with their brethren ere the European had landed
on their shores, navigation was yet in so immature a state in Northern
Europe as to secure to them an exemption from foreign invasion. In an
after age, however, when the roving Vikings had become formidable, many
of the eminences originally selected, from _their inaccessibility_, as
sites for hill-forts, would come to be chosen, from _their prominence in
the landscape_, as stations for beacon-fires. And of course the
previously erected ramparts, higher always than the inclosed areas,
wo