Exclusive of fishing vessels the tonnage of home and foreign going vessels was in 1882, 587,173; in 1909 it had advanced to over a million, hardly doubling itself in 27 years. While its imports have gone up from 522,544 tons in 1882 to 1,165,060 in 1909, the exports have made only a very slight advance. The chief export is herrings, and last year nearly 100,000 tons of these, salted and packed in barrels, were sent by sea. The fresh fish are dispatched by rail. Stones in the form of granite, either polished for monumental purposes or in setts and kerbs for paving, account for 50,000 tons. The remainder (of 210,554 tons) is made up by oats, barley, oatmeal, paper, preserved provisions, whisky, manures, flax and cotton fabrics, woollen cloth, cattle and horses, butter and eggs, salmon and pine-wood. The trade is mostly a coasting trade and more an import than an export one. Coal is the chief article of import, 600,000 tons being discharged in a year. Besides coal, esparto grass, wood-pulp and rags for paper-making, foreign granite in the rough state sent to be polished, flour, maize, linseed, the horns of cattle used for comb-making, and the salt used in fish-curing, are the chief materials landed on the Aberdeen quays. Aberdeen being the distributing centre for the county, and all the railway routes focussing in it, the coal and the building materials not produced in the district, such as lime, slate and cement, all pass this way, while the tea and sugar, the tobacco and other articles of daily use, also arrive mostly by the harbour. There are regular lines of steamers between Aberdeen and the following ports: London, Newcastle, Hull, Liverpool, Glasgow and Leith, as also with continental towns such as Hamburg, Rotterdam and Christiania. 16. History of the County. Standing remote from the centre of the country, Aberdeenshire has not been fated to figure largely in general history. The story of its own evolution from poverty to prosperity is an interesting one, but it is only now and again that the county is involved in the main current of the history of Scotland. If the Romans ever visited it, which is highly doubtful, they left no convincing evidence of their stay. Of positive Roman influence no indication has survived, and no conquest of the district can have taken place. The only records of the early inhabitants of the district—usually called Picts—are the Eirde houses, the lake dwellings or crannogs, the hill forts or duns, the “Druidical” circles and standing stones and the flint arrow-heads, all of which will be dealt with in a later chapter.