Edward Duke

“ Only think of the time and labour—the almost superhuman efforts—which it must have cost our forefathers to convey these ponderous stones to the spot, and then to shape and to set them up. Such sustained exertion as this, so laborious and so costly, requires a motive to account for it. And there is no motive we know of so powerful as what may be termed “the religious instinct.” ”

“ But no less weak and inconclusive is his reasoning when he brings his reader within the area of Stonehenge. He points attention to the fact that Sir R. C. Hoare had stated in his “Ancient Wilts,” I. p. 150:—“We have found in digging (within the circle) several fragments of Roman as well as coarse British pottery, part of the head and horns of deer and other animals, and a large barbed arrow-head of iron”; and he also mentions that Mr. Cunnington at an earlier date had discovered within the area some Roman pottery. ”

“ The force of this principle of human nature, even in its sadly corrupted state as it exists in the case of the ignorant and superstitious heathen, is nevertheless the strongest principle of action in the human breast. We see it in the tenacity with which heathen idolaters cling to their ancestral deities, or, as in India, in the enormous sums of money which have been lavished by the Hindoos on the construction and adornment of their idolatrous temples. Viewing Stonehenge, then, as a temple erected at a very p. ”

“ As in this case, there may have been diggings at different times; stones we know have been upset; earth is apt to accumulate in the lapse of time; and objects once on the surface to sink down and become buried. Time effects many such changes, and mistakes often arise from not bearing this sufficiently in mind.
But putting aside for the present the unsatisfactory evidence on which this theory is based, let us see whether the surrounding barrows have not something to say on the p. ”

“ Our question, then, is this—Does the position of the barrows in reference to Stonehenge, enable us to infer that they have been located with a special view to the temple which they surround so numerously? In answering this question we may at once admit that no regular order of position is observable. They do not appear to be placed p. ”