These simple relics of the primitive period may not inaptly recall to us the evidences of another class of occupants of the old Caledonian forests. At the very era when the Briton had to arm himself with such imperfect weapons, the wolf was one of his most common foes. Long after the era of the Roman invasion the wild boar was a favourite object of the chase, though the huge Bos Primigenius, whose fossil remains are so frequently found in our mosses and marl pits, had then made way for the Bos Longifrons, (rarely accompanying relics of a later era than the Anglo-Roman period,) and the Urus Scoticus, or Caledonian bull, which still forms so singularly interesting an occupant of the ancient forest of Cadzow, Lanarkshire. The large tusks frequently found among later alluvial deposits attest the enormous size attained by the Caledonian boar; and its repeated occurrence on the sculptured legionary tablets of Antoninus' wall may show that it was pre-eminent among the wild occupants of the forests which then skirted the Roman vallum in the carse of Falkirk, and along the slopes of the Campsie hills; if, indeed, this was not the reason of its adoption as the symbol of the Twentieth Legion. On constructing a new road a few years since, along the southern side of the rock on which Edinburgh Castle stands, deer's horns and boars' tusks of the largest dimensions were found; and in an ancient service-book of the monastery of Holyrood, the ground which some of the oldest buildings of the Scottish capital have occupied for many centuries, is described as "ane gret forest, full of hartis, hyndis, toddis, and sic like manner of beistis." Thus is it with all that is venerable--an older still precedes it; and the docile student, when, by searching, he has found out all attainable knowledge, still sees behind him as before him an unknown, undiminished by all he has recovered. Meanwhile, it seems to become manifest, that the more minutely we investigate the primitive Scottish era, the further it recedes into the past, and approaches to the period of the first dispersion of the human family amid the strange confusion of tongues; if not indeed to that still earlier time when the sons of Javan were born after the flood, and by these were the isles of the Gentiles divided in their lands--thus leading our thoughts, as Sir Thomas Browne quaintly, but devoutly expresses it, "unto old things and considerations of times before us, when even living men were antiquities, when the living might exceed the dead, and to depart this world could not be properly said, _abiit ad plures_, to go unto the greater number; and to run up our thoughts upon the _Ancient of Days_, the antiquary's truest object, unto whom the eldest parcels are young, and earth itself an infant." FOOTNOTES: [149] Archæol. Scot. vol. iii. p. 46. [150] Scots Mag., Feb. 7, 1790.