The discovery of any important deviation from the customary rites of sepulture has already been referred to as probable evidence of some unwonted change in the social condition of a people; marking, it may be, the introduction of a new element into the national creed, or the violent intrusion of some foreign race of conquerors, displacing older customs by the law of the sword. In the introduction of the funeral pile and the cinerary urn, we have one important evidence of the adoption of novel rites. In the systematic disposition of the body in a fixed direction, it is probable that we may trace another and still earlier change. Both practices are deserving of more careful investigation than they have yet received, in the relation they bear to the progressive advances of the primitive races of Scotland. Without the opportunity of comparing more extensive and trustworthy observations than we yet possess, it would be premature to insist upon the inferences suggested by them. But it accords with many other indications that we should find less method or design in the rude sepulchres of the earliest aborigines, than of those who had long located themselves in the glades of the old Caledonian forests, and abandoned nomadic habits for the cares and duties of a pastoral life. The establishment of such a distinction would furnish a valuable chronological guide to the archæologist in the arrangement of his materials for primitive history; meanwhile, it is only suggested for further observation. The early Christian adapted the position of his grave to the aspirations of his faith; and a similar practice among older races, in all probability, bore a kindred relation to some lesson of their Pagan creed, the nature of which is not yet perhaps utterly beyond recall. The question of divers races is, at least, one of comparatively easy solution. On this the investigations of the practical ethnologist may throw much light, by establishing proofs of distinct craniological characteristics pertaining to the remains interred north and south, from those belonging, as I conceive, to a still earlier period,--before the rude Caledonian had learned to attach a meaning to the direction in which he was laid to rest in the arms of death, or to dispose himself for his long sleep with thoughts which anticipated a future resurrection. FOOTNOTES: [51] Hibbert's Shetland, p. 452. [52] Account of the Islands of Orkney, by James Wallace, M.D., 1700, p. 58.