ever occasion demanded. I desire also to express my thanks to J. S. Young, Esq., upon whose estate the cavern is situated, for the ready permission granted us to make whatever use of the cave and its contents we thought fit.*

And now, on behalf of the subscribers to the "Kirkhead Fund," I have much pleasure in presenting to the Society the results of our researches.

Postscript.-There is one point respecting the human bones which I forgot to mention. I don't know that it is of much importance, but I have always found that bones in wet soil keep better than in dry. Some of the human bones from Kirkhead scarcely contain any animal matter, whilst others have nearly retained the whole. This I attribute to the presence or absence of water in the soil, some parts of the deposit in the cavern being saturated with water, and whenever such was the case the bones were in better condition.

* I have recently had placed in my hands a small volume of poems published in the year 1818, by the late Mr. John Briggs, of Cartmel. In this volume, a poem appears entitled "An Elegy, written in the Chapel Lands," to which is appended the following note:-" The Chapel-lands is a field near Allithwaite, in Cartmel, the property of the late Edward Barrow, Esq., of Allithwaite Lodge. Though tradition is perfectly silent with regard to anything which might tend to gratify the curiosity of the antiquary, yet the discovery of a stratum of human bones, regularly disposed, about three feet below the surface of the ground, evidently indicates this field to have been a receptacle for the dead;" and in the poem the following couplets appear:

And again,

"Here have they slept from ages so remote,
That e'en tradition leaves the tale untold."

"Here might some Druid's sacred circle stand,
And KIRKHEAD CAVE his lone asylum be."

the stone, the spade came against another stone, which we removed carefully, and Mr. Petrie at once pronounced it "to be a palm-branch rune."*

Both stones had the inscriptions downwards. After taking off about twelve inches more peat, we came upon a shell, that had all the appearance of having been a coffin. This was the first perfect box we had found, but it was quite empty, with the exception of a fatty substance at the bottom. We resumed our labours in the hope of finding other inscriptions; but although we saw just the same sort of stones in all directions, we had not the good fortune to find any other inscriptions. Dr. Hamilton was with us most of the time, and he contended that these were not really coffins, but the remains of wooden boxes made in the shape of coffins, in which smugglers had buried their treasure. He explained the broken boxes by supposing them to have been opened to take out the treasure, and the presence of woollen fabric as the remains of bags in which the money or treasure had been kept, and the markings on stones as something by which the position of these long boxes might be known. He explained the fact of the so-called coffin, in which we had found the inscriptions, being in a perfect state, by supposing that this box had been empty, and the stones it had not been necessary to touch. Besides this, Dr. Hamilton assured us that there was a well-known tradition in the Zetland islands of men having come to the islands, and under pretence of burying some of their crew, were in fact concealing treasure, which they were known to have come back afterwards to dig up. They had thus temporarily hidden their treasure in coffinshaped boxes to avoid suspicion. We heard also a vague tradition that a Russian vessel had come into the bay, having the plague on board, and that three of the crew who died had been buried on the spot where we were digging. Another tradition was that some people who had died in Lerwick, of leprosy, had been buried here. Both these traditions were, however, very vague, and even the cottagers in the neighbour

The inscriptions on these stones are figured in the next paper.

beard strong, and about a quarter of an inch long, the hair of his head short, his skin hard, and of a tanned leather-colour, pretty much the same as the liquor they lay in. The woman, by some rude person, had been taken out of the ground, to which one may well impute her greater decay. Mr. Barber, of Rotherham, the man's grandson, was at the expense of a decent funeral for them at last, in Hope Church, where, upon looking into the grave some time afterwards, it was found that they were entirely consumed.

Dr. Rennie, writing in 1810, says, "In the year 1773, in a turf-bog in Ireland, some wooden bowls, with arrow-heads, two or three sacks full of nuts, and a coat of very ancient texture, were dug up fifteen feet below the surface."

"The horns, hoofs, and bones of animals have been detected in moss, in a state of perfect preservation. . . . Dr. Percy, Bishop of Dromore, says, 'that the horns of an animal of uncommon size are found in the turf-bogs of Ireland. Dr. Walker was of opinion that this species belonged to an animal of the deer kind, which is not known to exist at present anywhere on the globe. That this animal was once a native of Ireland, and the elk of Scotland, is evident from the remains which have been found in peat-turf; nay, whole skeletons of animals, the existence of which is as remote, have been found deep in moss."" At another place he remarks,* "Even the softer parts of animals are found in a high state of preservation, though sunk deep in moss. . . . Dr. Walker mentions that two human bodies, which had been buried in moss for nine years, were found unconsumed at the expiration of that period. . . Some bodies were dug up in Ards moss, in Ayrshire, which had lain for a much longer period, even since the persecution of the Covenanters in the reign of Charles II. "There is reason to believe that a human being may be preserved for ages innumerable if buried deep in moss. In June 1749, the body of a woman was found, six feet deep, in a peat-mire, in the Isle of Axholm, in Lincolnshire. The

* Essay on the Natural History and Origin of Peat-Moss, by the Rev. Dr. Rennie, Edinb., 1810, p. 517, and loc. cit. p. 520.