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inauguration of the Royal Coronation Stone at Kingston, by which the inhabitants and contributors have done themselves so much honour, and our early history good service, induces me to offer a few remarks on its significance and early use, deduced from corresponding memorials in various and widely-distant countries, and from the observances concerning those at very remote intervals, some of which survived till within a comparatively recent period.

That stones must necessarily, in the earliest ages of society, have served as seats; that some of a particular form, or in a peculiar situation, were gradually elected from the mass as the royal throne of princes and kings, whence, when the pontiff and kingly character were united, they were deemed holy, and afterwards shed the halo of their sanctity on everything around, or in contact with them, is but the natural and gradual march of the human intellect from things common to select—from select to sacred and divine. The meteor-stones that had been observed to fall from heaven—the Bethulia —had an additional, perhaps to the savage mind an inevitable, cause of reverence, which in many cases, as in the Caaba of Mecca, or the misshapen fragment worshipped as a