It is thus seen to how large an extent the primitive canoe may have sufficed for remote ocean expeditions. The old navigators of the Clyde were probably not a whit less fearless than the native whalers of the Oregon coast; and they had to face dangers fully equal to any of those to which voyagers of the Pacific are exposed, whenever they navigated the lochs and island channels towards its mouth, or ventured beyond it, to face the gales and currents of the Irish Sea. The Clyde has supplied an unusually rich store of illustrations of primitive ship-carpentry; but the disclosures of another Scottish locality also merit notice here. The carse of Falkirk is intimately associated with some very memorable events of Scottish history. It is traversed by the vallum and chain of forts reared by Lollius Urbicus the Roman proprætor of Antoninus Pius in the early part of the second century, and is rich in memorials of many later incidents. But underneath lie far older records. In the year 1726, a sudden rise of the river Carron undermined a portion of its banks, and exposed to view a canoe of unusually large dimensions, fashioned with care from a single oak tree, and lying at a depth of fifteen feet beneath successive strata of clay, shells, moss, sand, and gravel. The Statistical Accounts record the discovery, in the vicinity of Falkirk, of another ancient boat buried thirty feet below the surface, in the same carse from which the remains of a mammoth were exhumed in excavating the Union Canal in 1821. Those traces of primitive human art have already been referred to in the _Prehistoric Annals of Scotland_, but a further discovery in the same locality confers a fresh interest upon them. Soon after the publication of that work, when on a visit to Falkirk, I was shown by Dr. G. Hamilton a human skull, which at once attracted my attention from its marked correspondence to the brachycephalic crania of ancient British graves. It is figured here, Fig. 52, from a careful drawing executed at a later date. The facial bones and the whole of the base are wanting, but enough remains to show that it is well developed, according to a type of crania of the early Scottish tumuli. But what confers a special interest on it is, that it was found in the same alluvial carse-land as the ancient canoes and the fossil bones of the _Elephas primigenius_, twenty feet below the surface, in a bed of shell and gravel, when digging the area of the large Grangemouth lock of the Union Canal, on the 29th of June 1843. Buried at such a depth in the detritus of the river-valley, it may be regarded as a record of the men of the period when the valleys of the Forth and Carron were navigable arms of the sea; and may even belong to the epoch when their shores were peopled by a race of fishermen contemporaneous with the whalers of Dunmyat and Blair-Drummond Moss, and with the monoxylous boatmen of the Clyde.