At the entrance to the Library door are placed two large glass cases, one filled with natural history specimens, the other containing the valuable collection of Roman remains, in metal, pottery, coins, etc., accumulated by Baron Clerk, which it would require the skill of an archæologist rightly to estimate. Among them is a curious and most interesting ivory carving, inscribed, on a parchment label, in the Baron’s handwriting, “An Antient piece of Sculpture on the Tooth of a Whale,—it was found by John Adair, Geographer, in the North of Scotland, Anno 1682, all the figures are remarkable.” In this year Adair, the Geographer for Scotland, was appointed by the Privy Council of Scotland to make a survey of the kingdom and maps of the shires, of which only a portion was published. The carving represents a crowned queen, seated holding a lapdog on her knees; with a knight, wearing a surcoat over chain-armour, and bearing a sword and a shield blazoned with a _chevron chequé_, standing on her left; and on her right a musician playing on a crowde, an old instrument resembling a violin; while between these, round the rest of the ivory, is a row of female figures, wearing long flowing robes, standing with clasped hands, that beside the musician holding a palm-branch. The carving is described and figured in Dr. Daniel Wilson’s “Prehistoric Annals of Scotland.” Dr. Wilson considers it to be a queen piece of a chess set, and assigns it to the fourteenth century. XIV. In the Charter-room are preserved, in addition to documents, many curious miscellaneous relics of an artistic and personal sort. The MSS. include the account-books of the family, extending well into the seventeenth century, kept with the minutest accuracy, and containing many entries of great interest to the student of the social manners of the past. There are also voluminous devotional compositions, commonplace-books, etc., by the first Baronet; and the MS. “History of my Life,” and the two volumes of the “Journal of my Travells for 5 years Through Holland, Germaine, Italy, France, and Flanders,” by the second Baronet, Baron Clerk, along with the MSS. of several of his published and unpublished historical and antiquarian pamphlets. A somewhat grim development of portraiture is seen in a couple of waxen death-masks—one of them shows the face of Lady Margaret Stuart, the Baron’s much-loved first wife—each casketed in its little wooden case or shrine. The habit of preserving such masks seems to have been common in Scotland during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,—we remember that the Abertarff sale included several representing various members of the Lovat family: a survival, one may call it, of the old Roman custom of preserving the waxen images of ancestors, which prevailed, too, in France, in the days when Clouet was summoned to Rambouillet, to cast the waxen effigy of the dead Francis I.