same kind of pottery will content a people for ages. If nature has thrown them the calabash, a ready-made vessel, their _instinct of pottery_ will not be developed at all; they will content themselves with the calabash. Mr Wilson brings together in a very pictorial manner the two extremes of this human art of boat-building:— “On the banks of the Scottish Clyde the modern voyager from the New World looks with peculiar interest on the growing fabrics of those huge steamers, with ribs of steel, and planks, not of oak, but of iron, which have made the ocean, that proved so impassable a barrier to the men of the fifteenth century, the easy highway of commerce and pleasure to us. The roar of the iron forge, the clang of the forehammer, the intermittent glare of the furnaces, and all the novel appliances of iron shipbuilding, tell of the modern era of steam; but meanwhile, underneath these very shipbuilders’ yards, lie the memorials of ancient Clyde fleets, in which we are borne back up the stream of human industry far into prehistoric times. The earliest recorded discovery of a Clyde canoe took place in 1780, at a depth of twenty-five feet below the surface, on a site known by the apt designation of St Enoch’s Croft. This primitive canoe, hewn out of a single oak, rested in a horizontal position on its keel; and within it, near the prow, there lay a curiously suggestive memorial of the mechanical arts of the remote era to which the ancient ship of the Clyde must be assigned. This was a beautifully finished stone axe or celt, doubtless one of the simple implements of the allophylian Caledonian to whom the canoe belonged, if not, indeed, the tool with which it had been fashioned into shape.” From the hollowed trunk of a tree, hewn with a stone axe by this “allophylian,” as Mr Wilson delights in calling him, to the iron steam-vessel that would have carried him and all his tribe across the Atlantic, the advance is great indeed. And a very curious sentiment must arise in the man who has seen this canoe dug up from under the busy streets of Glasgow, and then afterwards in another continent, on some lake or river not yet quite appropriated by the white man, has watched some prowling Indian paddling about in a canoe not much unlike it. The past and the present seem to live together before him: it is not the ends of the earth only that are brought together for him; he appears to embrace the first and the last of the generations of mankind.