342 OLD AND NEW EDINBURGH. [Burdiehouse.
intelligence to the enemy, which occasioned the
imprisonment of his person until the mistake was
discovered.?
He returned home in 1767, and after obtaining
a full pardon in 1771, ?he repaired the mansion
of his ancestors, improved his long neglected acres,
acd set forward the improvements of the province
in which he resided.??
In the year 1772 he published, at the request of
the East India Company, a work on the principles
of money, as applied to the coin of Bengal ; and in
1773, on the death of Sir Archibald Stewart Denham,
he succeeded to the baronetcy of Coltness,
and died in 1780. His works, in six volumes,
including his correspondence with the celebrated
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, whose acquaintance
he made at Venice in 1758, were published by his
son, Sir James Stewart Denham, who, when he
died, was the oldest general in the British army.
He was born in 1744 and in 1776 was lieutenant-
colonel of the 13th Dragoons (now Hussars),
and in his latter years was colonel of the Scots
Greys.
Towards the close of the last century, Goodtrees,
or Moredun, as it is now named, was the property
of David Stewart Moncrieff, advocate, one of the
Barons of Exchequer, who long resided in a selfcontained
house in the Horse Wynd. Sir Thomas
MoncrieiT, Bart., of that ilk, was his nephew and
nearest heir, but having quarrelled with him, according
to the editor of ? Kay?s Portraits,? he bequeathed
his estate of Moredun to Lady Elizabeth Ramsay,
sister of the Earl of Dalhousie.
He was buried on the 17th April, 1790, in the
Chapel Royal at Holyrood, where no stone marks
his grave.
At, the western portion of the Braid Hills (in a
quarter of St. Cuthbert?s parish), and under a
shoulder thereof 609 feet in height, where of old
stood a telegraph-station, lies the famous Buckstane,
which gives its name to an adjacent farm.
The Clerks, baronets of Penicuick, hold their land
by the singular tenure of being bound to sit upon
the large rocky fragment here known as the
Buckstane, and wind three blasts of a horn when
the King of Scotland shall come to hunt on the
Burghmuir. Hence the fzmily have adopted as
their crest a demi-forester proper winding a horn,
with the motto, ? Free for a blast?
About midway between this point and St
Katherine?s is Morton Hall, a handsome residence
surrounded by plantations, and having a famous
sycamore, which was planted in 1700, and is
fourteen feet in circumference. John Trotter of
Morton Hall, founder of this family, was a merchant
in Edinburgh, and was born in 1558, during the
reign of Mary,
A mile westward of Morton Hall are the remains
of a large Roman camp, according to Kincaid?s
? Gazetteer? of the county.
Burdiehouse, in this quarter, lies three miles
and a half south of the city, on the Peebles Road.
? Its genteel name,? according to Parker Lawson?s
?Gazetteer,? ?is Bordeaux, which it is supposed
to have received from its being the residence
of some of Queen Mary?s French domestics;
but it has long lost that designation. Another
statement is that the first cottage built here was
called Bordeaux.?
Most probably, however, it received its name as
being the abode of some of the same exiled French
silk weavers who founded the now defunct village
of Picardie, between the city and Leith. It is
chiefly celebrated for its lime-kilns, which manufacture
about 15,000 bolls annually. There is an
immense deposit of limestone rock here, which has
attracted greatly the attention of geologists, in consequence
of the fossil remains it contains.
In 1833, the bones, teeth, and scales of what
was conjectured to be a nameless, but enormous,
reptile were discovered here-the scales, strange to
say, retaining their lustre, and the bones their porous
and laminated appearance. These formed the
subject of several communications to the Royal
Society of Edinburgh by Dr. Hibbert, who, in his
earlier papers, described them as U the remains of
reptiles.?
In 1834, at the meeting of the British Association
in Edinburgh, these wonderful fossils-which
by that time had excited the greatest interest
among naturalists-were shown to M. Agassiz,
who doubted their reptile character, and thought
they belonged to fish of the ganoid .order, which
he denbminated sauroid, in consequence of their
numerous affinities to the saurian reptiles, which
have as their living type, or representative, the
lepidosteus; but the teeth and scales were not
found in connection.
A few days afterwards, M. Agassiz, in company
with Professor Buckland, visited the Leeds Museum,
where he found some great fossils having the same
kind of scales and teeth as those discovered at
Burdiehouse, conjoined in the same individual. It
is now, therefore, no longer a conjecture that they
belonged to the same animal. And in these selfsame
specimens we have the hyoid and branchiostic
apparatus of bones-a series of bones connected
with the gills, an indubitable character of fishesand
it is, accordingly, almost indisputable that the
Burdiehouse fossils are the remains of fishes, and
