stone roof, is also standing; over it is a room of the same shape, in all likelihood the place where the charters were kept. Here are the remains of an inscription in the black letter, which began with Stultus. The inside of the whole building seems to have been plastered. Near the water there is a range of offices. Near the chapter-house are the remains of a very large semicircular arch. In the adjoining grounds lies the old carved stone, said to be a Danish monument, engraved by Sir Robert Sibbald, in whose book it is delineated as having a human head at each end. At present it is so defaced by time and weather, that nothing like a head can be distinguished at either end; indeed, it requires the aid of a creative fancy to make out any of the sculpture; something like a man with a spear is seen on the north side, and on the south the figure of a cross. It has been removed from its original situation." The mistake in regard to all such monuments consists, we think, in vulgarly classing them as Danish, and not anti-Danish, as Mr. Chalmers of Auldbar has proved those of Forfarshire to be, and as the minister of Inverkeithing justly designates "the standing stone," of ten feet high, in the north of that parish, where the defaced, rude, weatherbeaten figures still indicate, on the eastern side, two

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armed equestrian forms, one behind another. Would the Danes, we should like to know, have been apt to ornament their monuments with crosses, as in the case of the "Danish stone" of Inchcolm?

Inchcolm must always have been a place of worship. Etymology assigns it, under its old Celtic name Aemonia, to the possession of the Druids (Aemonia signifying the "Druid's Isle"), at a period long prior to authentic history. But whether it has always been destitute of trees, with which the Earl of Moray only recently failed in his endeavours to clothe it, we do not know. St. Columba himself, or some of the Culdees, his immediate followers, next planted Christianity on the spot; and it would seem to have been a stronghold of the Culdee worship, for it was a century after the foundation of the monastery, and in the second year of the reign of Alexander III., that the censure which extirpated that comparatively pure and truly primitive Christian sect, and suppressed their order, was pronounced against them by the Romish clergy in the church of Inverkeithing" Acta in ecclesia parochiale de Innerkethyn."

History gives various but not particularly conflicting accounts of the origin of the monastery in 1123. Alexander Acer (I.), according to that grand historical