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calcined like limestone, produced excellent manure (n). Near Moffat, which
has been the longest famous in this shire for its waters, there is also a petrify-
ing spring which has been little noticed amidst the streamlets of higher
qualities (o). On the shores of the Solway Frith, there are several small springs
of salt water that issue from the rocks, but these are supposed to derive their
waters from the Frith, and not from salt beds or rocks which are impregnated
with salt (p).
The owners of land in Dumfriesshire are not unconscious of the value
of what belongs to them below the surface of the soil. They have recently
caused a survey to be made of the internal structure of the country by
mineralogists. They have thus discovered the bowels of the mountains to be
opulent in ores, rich in minerals, and salubrious in springs; and Dumfries-
shire has been in this manner found to be more valuable than had been
conceived by ignorance, and more important than had been estimated by
inattention.
§ IV. Of its Antiquities.] The earliest remains of the aboriginal people are
the people themselves. The stone monuments are the next in age. The
Druid circles and their other places of worship, the Cromlechs, signifying
literally in the language of those people the inclined flat stone, which are
connected with those circles; the Cairns and the rocking stones, the grey
upright stones and the sepulchres, the existence whereof in every district
of our island, evinced that the same people originally colonized every inhabit-
able part of Great Britain (q). The Caves also may be here mentioned as the
original dwelling places of the first people ; and the hill-forts, which are in this
country everywhere the same, are so many confirmations that the ancient
Britons were the first colonists of the British Island (r).
The British Selgovce are the people who inhabited Annandale, Nithsdale,
Eskdale, with the eastern part of Galloway, as far as the Dee, which was
their western limit, while they had the Solway Frith for their southern
boundary (s).
(n) Stat. Acco., xiv. 411.
(o) Ib., ii. 297.
(p) Jameson's Mineralogy of Dumfriesshire.
(q) See Caledonia, 1, 72-76, for specifications of those stone monuments. For the antiquities of
the British tribes, see Caledonia, B. 1, ch. xi.
(r) On those topics, see the same book, ch. i., and throughout.
(s) Ptolomy and Richard, as quoted in Caledonia, B. 1, ch. ii.
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