Investigation is, in this country, ever apt to strip our stone edifices of their hoar antiquity. Mr Petrie has “taken the shine,” as the Cockneys say, out of the round towers of Ireland, by showing that they have the ordinary details of the Romanesque ecclesiastical work, and has rendered it unnecessary to decide whether they are anchorite hermitages for a multitude of rivals to St Simeon Stylites, or temples for Photic or for Phalic worship. Criticism has gone in the same way back upon our castles, proving, in truth, that very few of them are so old as they were supposed to be. Yet there is a particular class of buildings of a systematically castellated type, which the scythe of the archæological iconoclast has not yet swept—on the age of which no particle of authentic light has been cast, and which we are thus entitled to count as old as we like. These are the circular towers called sometimes Dunes, Burghs, Danish forts, Pictish forts, &c., scattered hither and thither in the far northwest of Scotland. They are supposed to be of Scandinavian origin—to have been the fortresses built by the Seakings, but nothing in the least degree resembling them has been found elsewhere within Scandinavian land. Their mysterious builders have carefully avoided every particle of incidental evidence that might lead to a betrayal of their origin. Graceful and symmetrical as they are in their outline—perfectly circular, and rising without a bulge in a decreasing sweep from the broad base—there is not a single ornament or moulding to let the antiquary detect them, as the Romanesque work proved the betrayal of the Irish round towers. Nay, there is not the mark of chiselling on the stones to show that human hands have touched them. That can be inferred from the structure alone; and the unhewn lumps of mica schist or gneiss are laid in distinct courses perfectly parallel and round, by the selection of rough stones of equal size, and the insertion of minute splinters to make up deficiencies—for, as there is no stone hewing, there is also no cement. It is the most puzzling of the peculiarity of these perplexing buildings, that they have tiers of galleries running round them within the thickness of the wall. To form the roofs of these tiny serpentine chambers, large slabs have been necessary, but, in some marvellous manner, they have been obtained without being wrought; for, on the largest, it is vain to look for the mark of a chisel, or even artificial squaring or smoothing. It would seem, at least in such of them as we have seen, that the thinnest large slabs of schist had been collected in the mountains, and brought probably from great distances to fulfil the object of the builder.