INTRODUCTION. "Let Glasgow Flourish,' St. Mungo said, Over the first foundation stone Of a town, where the wild stretched waste and lone." AN acquaintance with the customs and habits of our ancestors, contributes as much to our advancement in useful knowledge as the instructions dictated by personal experience improve us in the art of conducting our lives with wisdom and prudence. In both cases, a retrospective view furnishes the means of preventing many mistakes which might otherwise be committed. The individual, it has been remarked, who zealously labours in the promotion of the study of antiquity, is somewhat allied to the philosopher who, ardent in the elucidation of those principles which regulate the operations of the universe, confers a benefit on his fellow creatures. By accurate researches into what is past, and candid inquiries into what is present, a wide field of useful contemplation is open to the mind. In the present age, the importance of this truth seems to have become apparent; for the now living generation, more, perhaps, than any which has gone before, is peculiarly distinguished for a spirit of antiquarian research; and to procure any relic of by-gone times, every part of the world is now diligently searched by the inquisitive eye of the virtuoso and natural historian. And few countries teem with things of the past like our own land. In every district are to be seen objects, which, when contemplated, call up before the mind's eye some great event of a former day, the remembrance of which serves at once as a beacon to warn us, and as a lamp to guide our path in the pursuit of knowledge. No branch of the history of man is so much involved in obscurity as that which relates to manners and the progress of the useful arts. In the progression of civil society things are perpetually changing. Improvements are made proportioned to the state of our knowledge at the time; and to resist the march of improvement is impossible, since progress is the characteristic of civilized man. The true wisdom of a nation lies in cautiously advancing, and providing for the slow but sure eradication of popular errors, by the extension of information. Peculiar customs originate from certain states of arts, which, after prevailing for a season, gradually disappear as the circumstances that gave rise to them fall into oblivion. What deserves most to be regretted is, that those circumstances, though of much importance in the history of civil society at the time they prevail, are no sooner passed than they are entirely forgotten. At the time they are in existence no person attempts to describe them with care, because they are then deemed to be of such public notoriety as to be known to all; and, when they begin to fall into disrepute, they are despised as unworthy of notice, and are suffered to slide imperceptibly into oblivion. From this obscurity they are sometimes attempted to be recovered by the antiquary, who, from incidental allusions of poets, or casual notices of other authors, is able, at best, to give but a faint and imperfect view, often an erroneous picture of them, while a few lines from a contemporary observer would have transmitted them with indelible force to posterity. But the knowledge which man receives from the study of antiquity is not merely derived from those national muniments, the verity of which all consider as indisputable. Popular tradition, also, is a subject pregnant with useful knowledge, although often held in light estimation, as if the mere fiction of the mind, and destitute of all foundation in truth. Many accounts, to be sure, are handed down to us, both by oral and written tradition, of events which probably never took place, and which were, in all likelihood, at first the invention of some over-credulous or idle mind; but this is not a reason why all the statements made to us through this medium are to be branded as fabulous. Tradition, when it refers to the great events of a nation, is not unfrequently a faithful historian, especially among a people like the Scots, whose wandering bards were, from time |