d and of savage countries are assuredly
parallel. The use of charm stones in civilisation and savagery is
assuredly parallel. The application to these stones of the archaic
patterns, by a rude race in Clydesdale, familiar with the patterns on
rocks in the district, has in it nothing _a priori_ improbable.

XXVI--EUROPEAN PARALLELS TO THE DISPUTED OBJECTS

I am not so sure as Dr. Munro is that we have not found small perforated
stones, sometimes inscribed with archaic patterns, sometimes plain, even
in Scotland; I shall later mention other places. For the present I leave
aside the small stone, inscribed with concentric horse-shoes, and found
in a hill-fort near Tarbert (Kintyre), which a friend already spoken of
saw, and of which he drew for me a sketch from memory. In country houses
any intrinsically valueless object of this kind is apt to fall out of
sight and be lost beyond recovery.

Sir John Evans, however, in his work on _Ancient Stone Implements_, p.
463 (1897), writes: "A pendant, consisting of a flat pear-shaped piece of
shale, 2.5 inches long, and 2 inches broad, and perforated at the narrow
end, was found along with querns, stones with concentric circles, and cup-
shaped indentations worked in them; stone balls, spindle whorls, and an
iron axe-head, in excavating an underground chamber at the Tappock,
Torwood, Stirlingshire. One face of this pendant was covered with
scratches in a vandyked pattern. Though of smaller size this seems to
bear some analogy with the flat amulets of schist of which several have
been discovered in Portugal, with one face ornamented in much the same
manner."

For these examples Sir John Evans refers to the _Transactions of the
Ethnological Society_. {100a}

If by "a vandyked pattern," Sir John means, as I suppose, a pattern of
triangles in horizontal lines (such as the Portuguese patterns on stone
plaques), then the elements of this form of decoration appear to have
been not unfamiliar to the designers of "cups and rings." On the cover
of a stone cist at Carnwath we see inscribed concentric rings, and two
large equilateral triangles, each containing three contingent triangles,
round a square space, uninscribed. {100b} The photograph of the Tappock
stone (figs. 9, 10), shows that the marks are not of a regular vandyked
pattern, but are rather scribbles, like those on a Portuguese perforated
stone, given by Vasconcellos, and on a Canadian stone pendant, published
by