scattered signs beneath, while the rest of the mass was composed of
a rock more soft and foliated. Graphic granite, it may be mentioned,
generally occurs, not in masses, but in veins and layers. The
inscription had been described in a previously published dissertation of
immense erudition, as Runic; but a Runic scholar of the party found he
could make nothing of it. The philosopher himself was struck by the
frequent repetition of characters of nearly the same form on the stone;
but he was ingenious enough to get over the difficulty, by remembering
that in our notation, after the Arabic manner, characters shaped exactly
alike may be very frequently repeated,--nay, as in some of the lines of
the Lapland inscription, may succeed each other, as in the sums I. II.
III. IIII. or X. XX. XXX.,--and yet very distinct and definite ideas
attach to them all. Still, however, he could not, he says, venture on
authoritatively deciding whether the inscription was a work of man or a
sport of nature. He stood between his two conclusions, like our
Edinburgh antiquarians between the two fossil Maries of Gueldres; and,
richer in eloquence than most of the philosophers his contemporaries,
was quite prepared, in his uncertainty, to give gilded mounting and a
purple pall to both.

"Should it be no other than a sport of nature," he concludes, "the
reputation which the stone bears in this country deserves that we should
have given a description of it. If, on the other hand, what is on it be
an inscription, though it certainly does not possess the beauty of the
sculpture of Greece or Rome, it very possibly has the advantage of being
the oldest in the universe. The country in which it is found is
inhabited only by a race of men who live like beasts in the forests. We
cannot imagine that they can have ever had any memorable event to
transmit to posterity, nor, if ever they had had, that they could have
invented the means. Nor can it be conceived that this country, with its
present aspect, ever possessed more civilized inhabitants. The rigor of
the climate and the barrenness of the land have destined it for the
retreat of a few miserable wretches, who know no other. It seems,
therefore, that the inscription must have been cut at a period when the
country was situated in a different climate, and before some one of
those great revolutions which, we cannot doubt, have taken place on our
globe. The position that the earth's axis holds at present with res