ent names of natural objects
and places supply the antiquary with this kind of audible archaeological
evidence. For, when cross-questioned at the present day as to their
nomenclature, many, I repeat, of our rivers and lakes, of our hills and
headlands, do, in their mere names, telegraph back to us, along mighty
distances of time, significant specimens of the tongue spoken by the
first inhabitants of their district--in this respect resembling the
doting and dying octogenarian that has left in early life the home of
his fathers, to sojourn in the land of the stranger, and who remembers
and babbles at last--ere the silver cord of memory is utterly and
finally loosed--one language only, and that some few words merely, in
the long unspoken tongue which he first learned to lisp in his earliest
infancy.

The special sources and lines of research from which Scottish inductive
Archaeology may be expected to derive the additional data and facts which
it requires for its elucidation are many and various. Let me here
briefly allude to two only, and these two of rather opposite
characters,--viz. (1), researches beneath the surface of the earth; and
(2), researches among olden works and manuscripts.

In times past Scottish Archaeology has already gained much from digging;
and in times to come it is doubtless destined to gain yet infinitely
more from a systematised use of this mode of research. For the truth is,
that beneath the surface of the earth on which we tread--often not above
two or three feet below that surface, sometimes not deeper than the
roots of our plants and trees--there undoubtedly lie, in innumerable
spots and places,--buried, and waiting only for disinterment,--antiquarian
relics of the most valuable and important character. The richest and
rarest treasures contained in some of our antiquarian museums have been
exhumed by digging; and that digging has been frequently of the most
accidental and superficial kind--like the discovery of the silver mines
of Potosi through the chance uprooting of a shrub by the hand of a
climbing traveller.

The magnificent twisted torc, containing some L50 worth of pure gold,
which was exhibited in Edinburgh in 1856, in the Museum of the
Archaeological Institute, was found in 1848 in Needwood Forest, lying on
the top of some fresh mould which had been turned up by a fox, in
excavating for himself a new earth-hole. Formerly, on the sites of the
old British villages in Wiltshire, the mo