Page:Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man.djvu/66

48 In those districts where large rivers, such as the Clyde, Forth, and Tay, enter the sea, the lower of the two deposits, or that of twenty-five feet, expands into a terrace fringing the estuaries, and varying in breadth from a few yards to several miles. Of this nature are the flat lands which occur along the margin of the Clyde at Glasgow, which consist of finely laminated sand, silt, and clay. Mr. John Buchanan, a zealous antiquary, writing in 1855, informs us, that in the course of the eighty years preceding that date, no less than seventeen canoes had been dug out of this estuarine silt, and that he had personally inspected a large number of them before they were exhumed. Five of them lay buried in silt under the streets of Glasgow, one in a vertical position with the prow uppermost as if it had sunk in a storm. In the inside of it were a number of marine shells. Twelve other canoes were found about a hundred yards back from the river, at the average depth of about nineteen feet from the surface of the soil, or seven feet above high-water mark; but a few of them were only four or five feet deep, and consequently more than twenty feet above the sea-level. One was sticking in the sand at an angle of 45º, another had been capsized, and lay bottom uppermost; all the rest were in a horizontal position, as if they had sunk in smooth water.

Nearly all of these ancient boats were formed out of a single oak-stem, hollowed out by blunt tools, probably stone axes, aided by the action of fire; a few were cut beautifully smooth, evidently with metallic tools. Hence a gradation could be traced from a pattern of extreme rudeness to one showing no small mechanical ingenuity. Two of them were built of planks, one of which, dug up on the property of Bankton in 1853, was eighteen feet in length, and very elaborately constructed. Its prow was not unlike the beak of an antique