of the Logan Stone is popularly applied in the Stewartry, therein corresponding with the term used in Cornwall and other districts of England. A second rocking stone formerly existed on the same range of hills, but it was thrown down about thirty years since. Others remain in the parish of Dron, Perthshire, on a hill in the neighbourhood of the manse; in the parish of Abernethy, celebrated for its venerable ecclesiastical relics; and on the north side of the Cuff Hill, in the parish of Beith, Ayrshire; but none of them present any very special peculiarity worthy of note. It is not designed to offer a new theory here concerning the purpose of these singular "Stones of Ordeal;" nor even to pronounce on the certainty of their artificial origin; but I cannot help thinking it opposed to every doctrine of probabilities, that nature in the course of her ceaseless operations of denudation and attrition should in so many instances have _chanced_ to wear away an amorphous rock so as to leave it poised in its centre of gravity on a single point. So numerous are the examples of rocking stones, that those who assign to them a natural origin would seem justified in anticipating the discovery of some unknown law of nature tending to such a result. But even if this extravagant doctrine of their origin is adopted, the rocking stones will still justly come within the range of archæological studies, as it can hardly admit of a doubt that they were objects of reverent estimation by the old monolithic builders. It is rare to find them far removed from a stone circle or other primitive structure, which may indeed have owed its erection to the prior existence of the rocking stone, but would more naturally suggest the old conclusion that also originated in the same laborious contrivance and skill which reared the ponderous dolmens, cromlechs, and monolithic groups already described. FOOTNOTES: [107] Sinclair's Statist. Acc. vol. iv. p. 546. [108] Archæologia, vol. xxv. p. 24. References to such landmarks are not uncommon in ancient charters. Notice of certain bound stones, at _Stansfield_, Staffordshire, occurs in a deed dated 6 Henry VII., ibid. vol. ii. p. 359, and similar allusions are common in the Scottish chartularies. [109] Joshua xv. 6; xviii. 17; Deut. xix. 14; Prov. xxii. 28, &c. [110] Wyntoun's Cronyklis, book v. chap. vii. fol. 88. [111] Gael. _cam_; Gr. καμψος; Lat. _curvus_; Gael. _camus_, a bay. The prefix _cam_, or crooked, enters into many Gaelic compounds and proper names. [112] Bellenden's Boece, b. xi. chap. viii. [113] Roy's Military Antiquities, p. 103. [114] Caledonia, vol. iii. p. 233. [115] Gael. _Tanaiste_, a thane or lord, the next heir to an estate. [116] Wyntownis Cronykil, book iii. chap. ix.