ar tells us the wheels of the British war-chariots
made, a loud noise in running; and whether or not they had, as some
authorities maintain, scythes or long swords affixed to their axles)? or
where we might dig up another specimen of such ancient and engraved
silver armour as was some years ago discovered at Norrie's Law, in Fife,
and unfortunately melted down by the jeweller at Cupar? or could any of
the deputation refer us to any spot where we might have a good chance of
finding a concealed example of such glass goblets as were, according to
Adamnan, to be met with in the royal palace of Brude, king of the Picts,
when St. Columba visited him, in A.D. 563, in his royal fort and hall
(_munitio, aula regalis_) on the banks of the Ness?

Whence came King "Cruithne," with his seven sons, and the Picts? Were
they of Gothic descent and tongue, as Mr. Jonathan Oldbuck maintained in
rather a notorious dispute in the parlour at Monkbarns? or were they
"genuine Celtic," as Sir Arthur Wardour argued so stoutly on the same
memorable occasion?

Were the first Irish or Dalriadic Gaeidhil or Scots who took possession
of Argyll (_i.e._, Airer-Gaeidheal, or the district of the Gaeidhel),
and who subsequently gave the name of Scot-land to the whole kingdom,
the band of emigrants that crossed from Antrim about A.D. 506 under the
leadership of Fergus and the other sons of Erc; or, as the name of
"Scoti" recurs more than once in the old sparse notices of the tribes of
the kingdom before this date, had not an antecedent colony, under
Cairbre Riada, as stated by Bede, already passed over and settled in
Cantyre a century or two before?

Our Reformed British Parliament is still so archaeological as to listen,
many times each session, to Her Majesty, or Her Majesty's Commissioners,
assenting to their bills, by pronouncing a sentence of old and obsolete
Norman French--a memorial in its way of the Norman Conquest; and our
State customs are so archaeological that, when Her Majesty, and a long
line of her illustrious predecessors, have been crowned in Westminster
Abbey, the old Scottish coronation-stone, carried off in A.D. 1296 by
Edward I. from Scone, and which had been previously used for centuries
as the coronation-stone of the Scotic, and perhaps of the Irish, or even
the Milesian race of kings, has been placed under their
coronation-chair--playing still its own archaic part in this gorgeous
state drama. But is this Scone or Westminster coro