"In the third year of my progress in dragging successfully great quantities of marl, now and then in the middle of the lake I met with large fragments of deer's horns of an uncommon magnitude. As my operations were proceeding northward, about one hundred and fifty yards from the verge of the lake next the King's Park, the people employed in dredging in places deeper than usual, after having removed the first surfaces of fat blackish mould, got into a bed of shell marl from five to seven feet deep, from which they brought up in the collecting leather bag a very weighty substance, which when examined as it was thrown into the marl boat, was a heap of swords, spears, and other lumps of brass, mixed with the purest of the shell marl. Some of the lumps of brass seemed as if half melted; and my conjecture is that there had been upon the side of the hill, near the lake, some manufactory for brass arms of the several kinds for which there was a demand."[271] Rarely has a more interesting discovery been made, or one on an equally extensive scale, illustrative of the Scottish Bronze Period. Some of the most perfect and beautiful of these ancient weapons were presented to His Majesty George III.; others, doubtless also among the best specimens, were retained as family heirlooms, some of which were afterwards given to Sir Walter Scott;[272] but the remainder, including upwards of fifty pieces of swords, spear-heads, and fragments of other weapons, most of them more or less affected by fire, were presented to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, and formed the very first donation towards the founding of their valuable collection of national antiquities. The royal gifts and nearly all the family heirlooms have disappeared, but the whole of those presented to the Society still remain in their Museum. The swords are of the usual leaf-shaped form, with perforated handles, to which horn or wood has been attached. Some of the larger broken spear-heads have been pierced with a variety of ornamental perforations, and in addition to these there were bronze rings and staples, similar to those found on various occasions with other remains of the same period. The accompanying woodcut represents one of these, measuring three inches in diameter, along with a larger one in the Scottish Museum, which was found along with several bronze celts and swords, on the estate of Kilkerran, Ayrshire, in 1846, and more closely resembles the examples most frequently met with both in style and dimensions. [Illustration: Rings and Staples.]