In most cases, however, it may be assumed that the earliest weapons of metal were furnished, as the modern sportsman casts his bullets, by each warrior or craftsman becoming his own smith and founder; and when we consider the slow and tedious process indispensable for the completion of the stone hammer or lance-head of flint, we may readily perceive that it would be from the scarcity of the metals and not from any preference for primitive and more familiar arts, that the Briton of the transition-period continued to use the weapons of his fathers, or intermingled them with the more efficient ones which the new art supplied. Still it was probably long before he overcame the difficulty of casting metal in metal, and learned to model and cast his mould instead of laboriously cutting it from stone. In these, as in other stages of improvement, we detect, as it were, the old tide-marks in the progress of civilisation. The rude chip-axe improves into the highly polished wedge and celt; this in its turn gives way to the rude sand-cast axe, or to the similar weapon moulded in the indented stone. The celt and spear-head follow, gracefully formed and looped in the double mould of stone or bronze. The taste of the more experienced metallurgist also finds room for the exercise of the decorative arts, and transfers to the bronze implements the incised and chevron patterns which were first introduced on his vessels of unbaked clay. Still further evidences of progress will come under our notice, showing the extent to which civilisation had advanced before the late and more familiar metal superseded the works of bronze. In the romantic outskirts of the old Scottish capital some of the most remarkable evidences of the abundant remains of this era have been discovered. Reference has been made in a former chapter to the finding of stone cists and cinerary urns as the modern city extended over the suburban fields which lay beyond the old North Loch. Towards the close of the eighteenth century, when the spirit of agricultural improvement, which has been productive of such important results to Scotland, was beginning to take effect, the use of marl as a valuable manure was advocated and practised with a zeal no less wide spread and enthusiastic than has resulted in our own day from the discovery of the Guano Islands of the Pacific. One of the most zealous of these Scottish agriculturists was Sir Alexander Dick of Prestonfield, whose estate is bounded on the north by the romantic Duddingstone Loch, which there separates it from the ancient royal demesne of Holyrood Palace. In 1775 he constructed a canal, and prepared a couple of flat-bottomed boats, with the requisite dredging machinery attached to them. These were set afloat on the loch, and their projector thus describes some of the most interesting results of his labours in a letter communicated to the Earl of Buchan, the founder of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, shortly after its institution in 1780.