STONE AGE COOKERY.
[To THE EDITOR or THE " SPEOTATOR."1 SIR,—May I be allowed to supplement Miss Layard's- notes on the finding in England of stones which in prehistoric times had been placed red-hot in vessels to heat the liquid contents and Mr. George Mackenzie's reference to the survival until recently of this- practice in the North-West of Scotland? Pre- historic Scottish stones, fractured in the manner characteristic of their employment as " pot-beilersil were shown in the Historical Exhibition at Glasgow in 1911 (Catalogue, p. 821, item 7). Some of the specimens then exhibited had been- employed by prehistoric man as hammers and as anvils before being used as heaters. I discovered some twenty years ago such heaters (among some 3,000 other relics) on the site of a sand- overwhelmed village in Wigtownshire, the period of occupation of which was made clear by the associated: clay pots which had the coarse, walls, dabbed ornament, and the round bases peculiar to the rare fictilia made in Britain about 1,800 years B.C. Another village, similarly destroyed and many of its relics likewise preserved, I examined in Tiree, Hebrides, some years ago, and found there the class of stones in question, two examples still within a, hand-made pottery vessel nearly com- plete, which was found in its position as when in use and as at the moment before it became covered by the storm-driven sand. The Tiree settlement, judging from its pottery and other relics, is thought to have been occupied two or three centuries before
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