cotsman, battling and trying to prevent, if
possible, the further demolition of the antiquarian relics scattered
over Scotland.

Various human agencies have been long busy in the destruction and
obliteration of our antiquarian earth and stone works. At no period has
this process of demolition gone on in Scotland more rapidly and
ruthlessly than during the last fifty or a hundred years. That tide of
agricultural improvement which has passed over the country, has, in its
utilitarian course, swept away--sometimes inevitably, often most
needlessly--the aggers and ditches of ancient camps, sepulchral barrows
and mounds, stone circles and cairns, earth-raths, and various other
objects of deep antiquarian interest. Indeed, the chief antiquarian
remains of this description which have been left on the surface of our
soil are to be found on our mountain-tops, on our moors, or in our
woods, where the very sterility or inaccessibility of the spot, or the
kind protection and sympathy of the old forest-trees, have saved them,
for a time at least, from reckless ruin and annihilation. Some of the
antiquarian memorials that I allude to would have endured for centuries
to come, had it not been for human interference and devastation. For,
in the demolition of these works of archaic man, the hand of man has too
generally proved both a busier and a less scrupulous agent than the hand
of time.

Railways have proved among the greatest, as well as the latest, of the
agents of destruction. In our island various cherished antiquities have
been often most unnecessarily swept away in constructing these
race-courses for the daily rush and career of the iron horse. His rough
and ponderous hoof, for example, has kicked down, at one extremity of a
railway connected with Edinburgh (marvellously and righteously to the
dispeace of the whole city), that fine old specimen of Scottish
Second-Pointed architecture, the Trinity College Church; while, at the
other extremity of the same line, it battered into fragments the old
Castle of Berwick, a fort rich in martial and Border memories, and a
building rendered interesting by the fact, that in connection with one
of its turrets there was--at the command of Edward I. "the greatest of
the Plantagenets," (as his latest biographer boastfully terms
him)--constructed, some six centuries ago, a cage of iron and wood, in
which he immured, with Bomba-like ferocity, for four weary years, a poor
prisoner, and that priso