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ANCIENT ORCADIAN SKULL.
EBOM BAEROW AT NEWBIGGING, ISLAND OF POMONA, ORKNEY*.
Cranium pom Barrow at Newhigging.—Quarter-size.
SOLINTJS, speaking of the Orcades, says " Taoant homines." Ptolemy teUs us that north of the
Islands of Ooetis and Dnmna, He the Orcades, about thirty in number; but, he says not a word
of then- inhabitants. Whence we might be disposed to conclude that these islaads were not
known by the civüized world to be peopled in his day. Yet the mathematical method of tte
gi-eat Alexandrian geographer's concise descriptions, by no means necessarily includes a mention
of the people in every instance. The writer of the ' Cosmographia,' attributed to ^thicus, and
considered to belong to about the end of the foiu-th century, asserts twenty of the Orcadian
Islands to be desert, and fourteen to be inhabited. This statement seems to bear marks of
authenticity, as, at the present day, of the sixty-seven islands and islets, twenty-seven have
inhabitants. Eutropius and others ascribe to Claudius, among greater victories, the merit of
subduing the Orcades. Tacitus, with much greater colour of probability, ascribes theii- subjugation
to Agricola; when the Roman fleet first demonstrated the island-form of Britain, and
in the magnilociuent strain of an historian's diction, added the Orcades to the Empire. The
subsequent conquerors of these islands we need not refer to, as the cranial relic here introduced,
derived from the largest of the Orkneys, Pomona or Mainland, belongs to a period without
reasonable question more remote than that of the Roman rule in Britain. Hence it is
itself a pregnant evidence that these isles of Ultima Thüle,—however separated from the Roman
centre of civilization, however forbidding, cold and desolate, surrounded with seas of storm and
* In Gaelic the "Ore Isles," from "ore," a whale.
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