e they are, confessedly, well known to science, and
therefore to the learned forger who, nobody can guess why, dumped them
down with the other fraudulent results of his researches.

If the figurines be genuine, I suppose that the Clyde folk made them for
the same reasons as the other peoples who did so, whatever those reasons
may have been: or, like the West Africans, found them, relics of a
forgotten age, and treasured them. If their reasons were religious or
superstitious, how am I to know what were the theological tenets of the
Clyde residents? They may have been more or less got at by Christianity,
in Saint Ninian's time, but the influence might well be slight. On the
other hand, neither men nor angels can explain why the forger faked his
figurines, for which he certainly had a model--at least as regards the
female figure--in a widely distributed archaic feminine type of "dolly."
The forger knew a good deal!

Dr. Munro writes: "That the disputed objects are amusing playthings--the
sportive productions of idle wags who inhabited the various sites--seems
to be the most recent opinion which finds acceptance among local
antiquaries. But this view involves the contemporaneity of occupancy of
the respective sites, of which there is no evidence. . . ." {123a}

There is no evidence for "contemporaneity of occupancy" if Dunbuie be of
300-900 A.D., and Dumbuck and Langbank of 1556-1758. {123b} But we, and
apparently Dr. Munro (p. 264) have rejected the "Corporation cairn"
theory, the theory of the cairn erected in 1556, or 1612, and lasting
till 1758. The genuine undisputed relics, according to Dr. Munro, are
such as "are commonly found on crannogs, brochs, and other early
inhabited sites of Scotland." {124a} The sites are all, and the genuine
relics in the sites are all "of some time between the fifth and twelfth
centuries." {124b} The sites are all close to each other, the remains
are all of the same period, (unless the late Celtic comb chance to be
earlier,) yet Dr. Munro says that "for contemporaneity of occupancy there
is no evidence." {124c} He none the less repeats the assertion that they
are of "precisely the same chronological horizon." "The chronological
horizon" (of Langbank and Dumbuck) "_seems to me to be precisely the
same_, _viz._ a date well on in the early Iron Age, posterior to the
Roman occupation of that part of Britain" (p. 147).

Thus Dr. Munro assigns to both sites "precisely the same chrono