A more important discovery, made about the same time, was a group of artificial islands in Loch Dowalton, Wigtownshire, which were first described by his Grace the Duke of Northumberland (then Lord Lovaine) in a paper read at the Newcastle-upon-Tyne meeting of the British Association in 1863. (B. 56.) About two years later Mr. John Stuart, Secretary to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, visited Dowalton, and, owing to a greater drainage of the loch having been made in the interval, was enabled to re-examine the Dowalton islands under more favourable circumstances. The result of his labours was an elaborate paper to the Society, in which he gave a detailed account of the structure and relics of these crannogs, and also took the opportunity of incorporating into his article all the facts he could glean, so as to afford a basis for comparing the Scottish examples with those in other countries. (B. 94.) Since the publication of Dr. Stuart's paper in 1866, little progress was made in the investigation of Scottish crannogs, though traces of them were occasionally noticed in various parts of Scotland, till the discovery and examination of the Lochlee crannog, Ayrshire, in 1878-9. The work done at Lochlee was important, not only because of the varied collection of relics secured, but also on account of the interest it had excited in archæological research, the fruit of which has already been reaped by the discovery of no less than five other lake-dwellings in the south-west of Scotland, all of which have now been carefully investigated. Full details of these investigations are given in the Collections of the Ayrshire and Galloway Archæological Association, as well as in my recent work on the "Scottish Lake-Dwellings." (B. 331, 344, 373, and 426.) While such general indications of lake-dwellings can hardly be said to limit their geographical distribution to any given area in Scotland, it is a singular fact that, so far as the discovery of actual remains illustrative of the civilisation and social condition of their occupiers is concerned, we are almost entirely dependent on the investigations made at Dowalton, Lochlee, Lochspouts, Buston, Airrieoulland, Barhapple, and Friar's Carse, all of which are situated within the counties of Ayr, Dumfries, and Wigtown. In instituting a comparison between the relics of these respective groups their resemblance is so wonderfully alike that we have no difficulty in dispensing with the necessity of discussing the merits of each group separately; so that whatever inferences can be legitimately derived from a critical examination of any one group may be safely applied to the whole. As a preliminary to this inquiry the following details of the investigation of lake-dwellings in Scotland will, I trust, be sufficient to give general readers a tolerably correct notion of the social conditions and environments of the people whose history, solely from an archæological standpoint, it is our object here to pourtray.