The antiquaries of Scotland would heartily rejoice over the discovery of lost documents far less ancient than these. Perhaps I could name two or three of our colleagues who would perfectly revel over the recovery, for instance, of one or two leaves of those old Pictish annals (_veteres Pictorum libri_) that still existed in the twelfth century, and in which, among other matters, was a brief account (once copied by the Pictish clerk Thana, the son of Dudabrach, for King Ferath, at Meigle) of the solemn ceremony which took place when King Hungus endowed the church of St. Andrews, in presence of twelve members of the Pictish regal race, with a grant of many miles of broad acres, and solemnly placed with his royal hands on the altar of the church a piece of fresh turf in symbolisation of his royal land-gift. We all deplore that we possess no longer what the Abbot Ailred of Rievaulx, and the monk Joceline of Furness possessed, namely, biographies, apparently written in the old language of our country, of two of our earliest Scottish saints--St. Ninian of Whithorn, and St. Kentigern of Glasgow; and we grieve that we have lost even that Life of St. Serf, which, along with a goodly list of service and other books (chained to the stalls and desks), was placed, before the time of the Reformation, in the choir of the Cathedral of Glasgow, as we know from the catalogue which has been preserved of its library. But let us not at the same time forget that Scottish archaeological documents, as ancient as any of these, have been latterly rediscovered, and rediscovered occasionally in the most accidental way; and let us not, therefore, despair of further, and perhaps even of greater success in the same line. Certainly the greatest of recent events in Scottish Archaeology was the casual finding, within the last two or three years, in one of the public libraries at Cambridge, of a manuscript of the Gospels, which had formerly belonged to the Abbey of Deer, in Aberdeenshire. The margin and blank vellum of this ancient volume contain, in the Celtic language, some grants and entries reaching much beyond the age of any of our other Scottish charters and chronicles. The oldest example of written Scottish Gaelic that was previously known was not earlier than the sixteenth century. Portions of the Deer Manuscript have been pronounced by competent scholars to be seven centuries older. The most ancient known collection of the laws of Scotland--a manuscript written about 1270--was detected in the public library of Berne, and lately restored to this country. In 1824, Mr. Thomson, a schoolmaster at Ayr, picked up, on an old bookstall in that town, a valuable manuscript collection of Scotch burghal laws written upwards of four centuries ago. Sometimes, as in this last instance, documents of great value in Scottish Archaeology have made narrow escapes from utter loss and destruction.