As the public were allowed to break off and steal the prow of the Dumbuck canoe, it is plain that no guard was placed on the sites. They lay open for months to the interpolations of wags, and I think, for my own part, that one of them is likely to have introduced the famous blue points.
Dr. Munro tells us how a "large-worked stone," a grotesque head, was foisted through a horizontal hole, into the relic bed of his kitchen midden at Elie. "It lay under four inches of undisturbed black earth."
But it had been "interpolated" there by some "lousy tykes of Fife," as the anti-covenanting song calls them. {139}
It was rather easier to interpolate Blue Point oyster sh.e.l.ls at Dunbuie.
On the other hand, two splinters of stone, inserted into a bone and a tyne of deer"s horn, figured by Dr. Munro among Dumbuck and Dunbuie finds, seem to me rather too stupid fakes for the regular forger, and a trifle too clever for the Sunday holiday-maker. These two things I do not apologise for, or defend; my knowledge of primitive implements is that of a literary man, but for what it is worth, it does not incline me to regard these things as primitive implements.
x.x.xIV--CONCLUSION
_EXPLICIT_! I have tried to show cause why we should not bluntly dismiss the ma.s.s of disputed objects as forgeries, but should rest in a balance of judgment, file the objects for reference, and await the results of future excavations. If there be a faker, I hope he appreciates my sympathetic estimate of his knowledge, a.s.siduity, and skill in _leger de main_.
I am the forger"s only friend, and I ask him to come forward and make a clean breast of it, like the young men who hoaxed the Society for Psychical Research with a faked wraith, or phantasm of the living.
"Let it fully now suffice, The gambol has been shown!"
It seems to me nearly equally improbable that a forger has been at work on a large scale, and that sets of objects, unexampled in our isle, have really turned up in some numbers. But then the Caithness painted pebbles were equally without precedent, yet are undisputed. The proverbial fence seems, in these circ.u.mstances, to be the appropriate perch for Science, in fact a statue of the Muse of Science might represent her as sitting, in contemplation, on the fence. The strong, the very strong point against authenticity is this: _numbers_ of the disputed objects were found in sites of the early _Iron Age_. Now such objects, save for a few samples, are only known,--and that in non-British lands,--in _Neolithic_ sites. The theory of survival may be thought not to cover the _number_ of the disputed objects.
GLASGOW: PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO. LTD.