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ALTARS OF UNHEWN STONES.

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the rampart, although it can be distinguished, is comparatively insignificant, and adds nothing to the interest of the monument which it encircles.

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At Avebury the rocky masses are "whole stones, over which no man hath lift up any iron." This was a command to the Israelites, enjoined by Moses and enforced by Joshua, with regard to their devotional monuments. The ancient inhabitants of Britain, judging from their most ancient remains, appear to have been under some influence sufficiently powerful to insure their fanes and altars being formed by stones in their rude form, and never subjected to contamination by any instrument. Neither was this rule the result of necessity; for the ponderous masses of which Celtic monuments are so often formed could never have been moved to their places except on rollers, of which the forests of Britain offered a ready supply. The manner in which the houses of the early inhabitants were built, and their towns stockaded, is sufficient evidence that they possessed instruments wherewith to cut trees. There are also the vessels formed from single hard stones found in ancient fanes of

1 Exodus xx. 25; Joshua viii. 31.

2 The central stone of one of the interior circles at Avebury, seen by Stukeley in 1723, was 21 feet high, of a circular form, and 8 feet 9 inches in diameter; and it was then said that one end of the Avebury Inn was built from one stone broken up by the

masons.

3 On such rollers I have seen proof that, with a sufficient body of men,

unassisted by mechanism, the transport of large blocks can be accomplished.

4 Besides the chariots, which the Britons possessed in numbers, in the same book Cæsar mentions the position of Cassivellaunus on the river Thames, one of its banks being defended by sharp stakes, similar stakes being fixed in the bed of the river, and covered by the water.

North Britain, and other evidences of the Celtic races possessing tools by which, if so disposed, they could have shaped those materials which, however, were used in their rude form for the construction of devotional monuments.

Avebury, when carefully examined, appears to be amongst the most ancient, and Stonehenge-at least the prominent parts of it-the most modern of circular columnar fanes in Britain. On visiting Stonehenge one is struck with the great probability of an hypothesis that has been advanced—viz., that parts of this monument are the work of two different ages; for it is a compound erection, in which rude magnificence alternates with comparative meanness.

At Stonehenge there is a circle consisting of forty stones, not more that 5 feet in height, intervening between the outer circle and the oval designated by the five trilithons. In this circle the forty stones are of a different kind from that of which the rest of the monument is composed. They have been brought from a great distance and are unhewn, while all the large stones may have been found in the neighbourhood, and have been roughly shaped-some of them being connected together by rudely-formed projections and corresponding sockets, which serve to keep in their places those stones that have been raised to form the architraves of the trilithons, and to connect by a continuous cornice the outer circle of columns. Not only in the circle of forty are the stones small, of a different kind of stone, and unhewn, but 1 Wilson's Prehistoric and Archæological Annals of Scotland, p. 148.

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2 These great cornice-stones at

Stonehenge were probably raised to their place in the same, or in a still more simple manner, than the archi

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THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

ASTOR, LENOX
TILDEN FOUNDATIONS

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