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Notes on the Prior Existence of the Castor Fiber in Scotland. By CHARLES WILSON, M.D., F.R.C.P.E.

As a member of the Berwickshire Naturalists' Club, I beg to transmit the following notes on the former existence of the Castor Fiber, or Beaver, in Scotland; as suggested by a discovery of the remains of the interesting animal in a locality familiar to many of the Club's oldest members, and lying within the immediate circuit of its researches.

That the beaver was at one time indigenous in Scotland has been long known, and has, especially, already been noted by Dr. Neill of Edinburgh, in an interesting paper* read in 1819 before the Wernerian Natural History Society. Dr. Neill adduces two then known examples of the occurrence of the remains of the animal. The record of the first instance is derived from the Minutes of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, dated in December 1788; where it appears that Dr. Farquharson presented to the Society the skeleton of the head and one of the haunch-bones of a beaver, found on the margin of the Loch of Marlee, a small lake in the parish of Kinloch, in Perthshire, near the foot of the Grampian Mountains. The lake had been partially drained for the sake of the marl which it contained; and, in the process of excavation, under a bed of peat-moss between five and six feet thick, the beaver's skeleton was discovered. In a neighbouring marl-pit, a pair of deer's horns, branched, and of large dimensions, were found nearly at the same time; and, along with these, two bones, which our eminent anatomist Dr. Barclay suggested to have been probably the metatarsal bones of a large species of deer, contemporary with the beaver, but now, like it, extinct in our country. The relics of this beaver are still preserved in the Museum of the Royal Antiquarian Society in Edinburgh, where, like Dr. Neill, I have myself examined them. They appear to be those of an animal which had reached maturity. The back part of the cranium is gone, and the left zygomatic arch is broken; but the "haunch bone," or left os innominatum, is entire. A part of one side of the lower jaw-bone is also broken, and here only some remains of the very characteristic incisors still exist. The bones are dyed of a deep chocolate colour, the natural result of their long contact with the peaty substance.

The second instance adduced by Dr. Neill occurred in October 1818, on the estate of Kimmerghame, in the parish

* Memoirs of the Wernerian Natural History Society, vol. iii. (1821), p. 207.

of Edrom, near the head of that district of Berwickshire called the Merse. In the process of Draining a morass called Middlestots Bog, there was found, at the depth of seven feet from the surface, under a layer of peat-moss of that thickness, what appeared to have been the complete skeleton of a beaver, dispersed, however, in rather a promiscuous manner, as if through the gradual separation of the parts by unequal subsidence. The remains lay upon a surface of marl, in which they were partly imbedded, and partly in a whitish layer of mossy substance immediately superjacent. Only the denser bones of the cranium and face, and the jaw-bones, retained sufficient firmness to fit them for being removed and preserved in a dry state. Several of the long bones and the vertebræ, though they seemed perfect while lying in situ, crumbled under the touch, or after exposure. Near the same spot were found a pair of horns, of great size, and with fine antlers, belonging to the large species of deer already mentioned; and, among the vegetable remains in the peat, were the shells of filberts, with the wood of birch and alder, and that of oak in less abundance. The skull and lower jaw-bone are now in the museum of the University of Edinburgh. Both, as de

scribed by Dr. Neill, were entire, with all the incisors perfect, their cutting edges sharp, and the peculiar coloured enamel, found alike in the recent beaver, still subsisting on the outer convexity, though deepened to an almost jet-black. The molars were also complete. This is still the condition, with the exception that the right zygomatic arch is now imperfect. The animal, as in the preceding instance, appears to have been of mature, though not of advanced age. It is proper to add here, that, on the testimony of the writer of the Statistical Account of the parish, several other heads of the beaver were then found in the same deposit, but in less perfect preservation. We have thus approximative evidence of the ancient existence of a colony in the locality.

Of a third instance of the discovery of the remains of the beaver in Scotland, a verbal report was given by me, in 1843, at a meeting of the Club, and is noticed in the late esteemed Dr. Johnston's sketch of its proceedings for that year. On the verge of the parish of Linton, in Roxburghshire, there is a remnant of what has evidently once been a far more extensive loch, which had skirted for some distance the outer range of the Cheviot Hills, but which, from some alteration of the

The Statistical Account of Scotland: County of Berwick (1841), p. 267. + History of the Berwickshire Naturalists' Club, vol. ii., p. 48.

levels, has now, for the most part, gradually drained itself off to the westward. Into this loch had flowed the waters of the Cheviots, entering it, as the little river Kail, by a narrow gorge towards the eastern extremity: and it is doubtless through the agency of this often impetuous current, that those alterations have chiefly been effected which have diverted the stream from what is now the narrow limits of Linton Loch; and left it contracted to a few stagnant pools, imbedded in a deep but not extensive morass, from which, however, still flows a considerable body of water by an artificially constructed channel. The near vicinity of the loch presents many localities of interest, as well in legendary lore as from later associations. The hollow at Wormington, still known as the "worm's hole," marks, according to the familiar story, the ancient haunt of a monstrous serpent or dragon, the destruction of which, by William de Somerville, obtained for him the gift of the surrounding barony from William the Lion. The little knoll, consisting wholly of fine sand, on which the church of Linton is built, has seemed to the peasant to justify the tradition, that its elevation was the work of two sisters, who sifted the heap as a voluntary penance, to expiate in a brother the crime of murder. The traces of the foundations of the neighbouring fortalice, still lurking under their covering of green sward, recal the memory of more than one of the scarcely less stirring while more authentic scenes of border warfare; and closer to the loch, perched above its southern margin, we have the little possession of Wideopen, the inheritance of the poet Thomson, who is said to have gathered here, among the storms of the hills, many of the materials for the admirable descriptions in his poem of Winter.* Through the adjoining tract of the Cheviots, spreads that range of which it could be said, as in the ballad of the Battle of Otterbourne :

"The deer runs wild on hill and dale,
The birds fly wild frae tree to tree."

Few places, therefore, could be more appropriate for the discovery of any remains which were to aid in giving body to our traditions, as in forming a link between remote and existing states of civilization.

The moss, which constitutes the body of the Linton morass, is variable in depth, and covers a very extensive deposit of marl, to obtain which, for agricultural purposes, operations on a considerable scale were undertaken by the tenant, Mr. Purves, by whom the relic of the interesting animal, found in

History of the Berwickshire Naturalists' Club, vol. iii., p. 21: Linton and its Legends.