pillar; and Jacob said unto his brethren, Gather stones; and they took stones, and made an heap; and they did eat there upon the heap. And Laban called it, The heap of witness." So likewise over Achan, after "all Israel had stoned him with stones, they raised a great heap of stones over him unto this day.' It is possible, by the way, that the execution by stoning might have had some reference to the sepulchral and other tumuli usually reared to commemorate great men or remarkable events.

Again; over the King of Ai "they raised a great heap of stones that remaineth unto this day." That remaineth! we have seen many such perpetual memorials which have outlived the name and fame of their subjacent heroes; as--who knoweth anything of the once great potentate that lies beneath his pyramidal heap of white stones on the Slieve Bloom mountain? That remaineth! What indestructibility pervades a pile like this, for ages solemn and honored in its preservation, and thereafter to the end of time uninjured by decay, and changeless as the everlasting hills! We at least desire not to hint a doubt, but that the " very great heap of stones laid over Absalom," and "the pillar in the king's dale, which Absalom erected for himself to keep his name in remembrance, because he had no son," are now existing as at first, and remain a stony conical hill beside a granite peak, in some secret valley of Judea; there, whether or not now bearing traditional witness to the earthly perpetuity of Absalom's high name, they stand ready at least, and able, to remind some casual traveller from Redruth, or Wiltshire, of the native ancient works he counts Druidical.

Yet more; Moses is commanded to raise "an altar of earth and unhewn stones;" we may conceive it not unlike such a cromlech as may still be found in Guernsey, or at Kilmogue. Josephus (Ant. lib. i. c. 2.) mentions a pillar of stone, erected by the antediluvian posterity of Seth, extant in his time in the land of Seirath or Syrias:" just such a granite witness as may now be seen upon Iona, the Inis Drw, or Druid's Isle; and the like other upright blocks we have visited both at Inverary Castle, and near Penzance. Maundrell asserts that the "furnace" in which the three children, Ananias, Azarias and Misael, were miraculously delivered from the burning, was an open court of stones, (even such an one might have crowned the rocky hill above St. Helier's in Jersey, or have stood on the slope near

Harlech,) and that this place of fiery trial was not according to the usual notion of a kiln; indeed, it is difficult to imagine how king Nebuchadnezzar could have seen them walking in the midst of that fierce ordeal unscathed, or how the fire could have flamed aside and consumed the executioners, had the furnace been a close one we believe it to have been such an open fire-altar as we ourselves have in past years of highland pedestrianism turned aside to see near Taymouth Castle. It is easy to perceive how all these instances bear upon our point.

Moreover, Pliny speaks of a rocking-stone at Harpasa in Asia; and Ptolemy of one by the sea-side, which vibrated to the touch of an "asphodel:" he gives this stone the remarkable and barbaric epithet "gygonian ;" evidently the Celtic gwingog, rocking. Dodona had its sacred oaks with priests hidden in the ôpuès-Celticè, drws. It is worthy of note that Iona means a dove in Celtic; and the Eλía or "doves" were priestesses of Dodona. Now Iona was at one time the head-quarters of Druidism, after the more idolatrous Saxon had persecuted it to the extremities of the land in Cornwall, and other desolate and rocky places; to Anglesea also, and to Icolnkil. We see then a plain sympathy between Dodona and Iona; of some importance to our point, as connecting our own now so glorious, but once on a time the poor despised ancient Britain, with the early Greeks, lords of the earth. On the coast of Morocco, overlooking the broad Atlantic, are some mighty druidical remains worthy of Mount Atlas on whose shoulder they are resting: similar monuments are said to occur even in China. Apollonius Rhodius mentions that a rocking-stone existed in his day on the shores of Tenos, supposed to have been erected there by the Argonauts; and King, in his Munimenta Antiqua, (vol. i, p. 226,) says, as a matter of fact, that "the cromlech was introduced in the earliest ages, among the detestable superstitions of the Tyrians and Sidonians." Perhaps, when the Israelites made their children pass through Moloch's fire, it was a rite similar to the Druidic ordeal by fire; and perhaps the "stone upon which a man might be broken," or which falling on him should "grind him to powder," may, besides the common interpretations, be allusive to some Idumean rites and practices of a similar nature to those we call Druidical. To this mass of suggestions-for they are thrown out more in the nature of analogies than arguments. might add another discursive series of ex

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amples deduced from almost every country, which can show those rude temples of unhewn stones, coming under the general phrase οὐ χειροποίητα, "not made with hands:" a fine emblematical fancy, as if the Deity were looked up to as the only legitimate source of adornment, supplying every external appliance to his own service, unpolluted by mortal aid or arm.

We need now scarcely bring to bear the focus of light which such scriptural and historic instances as we have noted shed upon our many native cairns, cromlechs, obelisks, and circles. The reader, perhaps to his own surprise, will have some little while surveyed with a different eye the granite ribs of Druidism; and instead of judging them, as it were, the fossil remnants of some extinct destroying monster, he may see some reason to regard them more indulgently as the deep-wrought tracks in stone of the first strong faith of our race. Even granting that, in the corruption of long years, human sacrifices stained those granite altars, might even these not have had some traditionary reference to the great vicarious Substitute? Was the mistletoe, that strange, inexplicable growth, grafted as by a heavenly hand upon the unchanging oak of earthly immortality, in no way allusive to "the Branch," the cut twig that sweetened Marah? Is there not a moral grandeur to which the most decorated fanes have never reached, a sublimity of conception unparalleled, in the rude masses of Stonehenge, and, when perfect, in the vaster precincts of Abury? Is it a vain fancy to suppose, that the huge dynamical skill and power inferred of necessity by such pilings of Ossa on Olympus as cromlechs and rocking-stones imply, might have been immediately derived from those architectural giants in the olden world, the fabled Titans and Cyclops, who reared the walls of Corinth, set up strange monoliths in Edom, shaped the rocks of Elephanta, and piled the pyramids and Babel? Verily, a British cromlech is a structure of deep interest, when thus regarded as a link that connects us with the best and boldest of antiquity. Let farmers at Drewsteignton and engineers in Guernsey beware how they hazard the sacrilege of blowing them up, (a barbarous threat like this was once uttered in our ears)-let contractors for London granite tremble ere they touch such patriarchal holy-stones, and let lieutenants in the navy (we decline to give the wretch the notoriety he aimed at) pause one sober minute before they set a boat's crew to lever down a rocking-stone.

Druidical remains will be found naturally to class themselves into seven distinctions; and we trust that some additional analogies and coincidences on a road so little trodden, will serve to excuse a step or two retraced. It is likely, then, as a general observation, that all the seven classes have a sepulchral, or at least a commemorative origin: they may have been erected in consequence of the exploits, or over the dead bodies, of saints, chiefs and heroes, smaller or greater in dimensions according to merit; and, like the tombs of marabouts in Algeria and of fakirs in Hindostan, the holy monument may have in time become a place and station for religious worship. This was the case at Bethel, or Luz, an instance of the first among the seven Druidical classes, the single upright shaft or pillar; Jacob's stone became a hallowed burial-place, and afterwards a college of priests lodged there: the like of the Eben-ezer of Samuel, his stone of help. The upright-shaft class reached its highest phase of excellence in the carved obelisks of Egypt: that from Luxor, now in Paris, is a familiar instance of the newer apotheosis; while many a perpendicular log of granite against which cattle rub themselves in the meagre fields of Cornwall, is an example of the "old mortality."

The second class is the Cromlech, or stone altar, often of a vast size; at Kilmogue in Ireland is one, locally called Lachan Schall, the upper slab whereof is forty-five feet in circumference: at Plas-Newydd, in Anglesea, the stones are less in size, but the dimensions of the whole structure are gigantic; and not to be too tedious in examples, cromlechs occur generally wherever granite rocks and boulders are frequent; as in the Channel Islands, Cornwall, Dartmoor, &c.; near Exeter, for instance, there is a tidy little one, which is fifteen feet long, nine high, and ten broad.

The cromlech appears to be the first rude notion of what was improved afterwards into an arch: an Argive doorway is a cromlech, built into a Titanic wall; and magnificent Egypt has carried out the idea to a gorgeous immensity in its peculiarly shaped temples, with their leaning sides and flat ceilings. The form of the Gothic II is illustrative of this analogy; and as the letter A is the same, or nearly so, in most languages (the early Hebrew, aleph, is not an exception,) it leads one to suspect that the stone altar (such as Abel might have sacrificed upon) was, upon principles of piety, chosen as the form of the first letter.

The third Druidical class is the circular arrangement of stones and trees: the latter have nearly all of necessity perished from lapse of time, (and yet we can point out, on Merroe downs, in Surrey, two distinct concentric groves of venerable yews, a thousand years old, with remnants of like avenues, possibly Druidical)-but, for the less perishable rocky matter, where the road-surveyor has not hammered them up for highways, nor the Cornish farmer built them into his Cyclopic sheepfold, the circles of stone still frequently remain in situ, mocking time and its modernities. We find traces of these circular sites in Egypt; but as they were a people of parallels and angles rather than of curves, more stress has been laid upon the avenue than upon the circular arrangement; that of the Sphinxes at Karnac is but a glorified form of the long lane of rude stones at Abury.

Fourthly in class come the Kistvaens, or stone tombs, sometimes built with thick slabs, like small cromlechs; several of which occur in Guernsey, and one we recollect was, years ago, used as a pig-sty! but such desecrations are happily impossible now, under the indefatigable care of Mr. Lukis. Occasionally, these tombs are only cavernous indentations, roofed over, or doored-in sideways with a great stone: perhaps the cave at Macpelah, and even a more familiar and holier instance, may be allowed to connect our British stone sepulchres with those of sacred history. Here too, carrying out our analogies, the formally picturesque mind of Egypt, and its child Etruria, gives us the idea at its zenith in the carved sarcophagus. Fifth in order comes the Cairn, often reared over a kistvaen; according to an archæological poem now before us, entitled "The Complaint of an old Briton;" which

powerful tale "Behemoth") the subjacent skeleton is always strangely found with a copper cross upon its breast. In the cairn, above all other imitations, the magnificence of Egypt is pre-eminent; "her pyramids eterne of mountain build" are assuredly the most glorious cairns of human piling. And how interesting is it to us Britons-the despised barbaric hordes "at the ends of the the earth"-to note such evident traits of an early eastern origin for the humbler tumili that crown our Cornish heights, and are thickly studded over the downs of Dorsetshire! From the heaped ramparts of Maidun Castle it is easy to count (I have done it myself) threescore and upwards of such pious mounds; and they stretch far away, knobbing every hill in the neighborhood of Weymouth with evidences that our fathers were not the degraded, uncivilized, and cannibal race of savages which many moderns think them; from the imputation of which calumnies archæology alone has power to redeem their memories. We do not claim indeed for these so hoar antiquity as for many other cairns, but we recognize them, nevertheless, as legitimate children of the patriarchal times--only one remove from the Druidical remains of Britain. These also are traditionary offsets of the earliest natural religion; and that which, in our ignorant complacency, we have been accustomed to regard as utterly pagan, heathenish, and abominable, may have been but a very few shades darker than the dim lights accorded to the patriarchs.

Sixthly may be numbered the Tolmen, or stones of passage: such did Israel erect in the middle of Jordan for a testimony; of such also are the ancient terminal logs of Rome and Greece; likewise, rock-built waymarks, and possibly such as here and there occur over moors, and in mountainous paths, as of Scotland, Wales, and elsewhere. Perhaps the great Nilometers of Egypt, though put in after times to the agricultural good use of marking the level of the river, had originally somewhat to do with stones of passage; they may have marked a ghaut, or ferry-place, and in Upper Egypt, among the falls of Philæ, they might have pointed out a ford. On the banks of the Teign, a few miles north of Exeter, we noticed, conjecturally, a tolmen; and we doubt not but that local instances might be found in plenty of large detached stones lying near many a ferry.

Seventhly, and last in time as in order, we place the Logging or Logan stones. Here

alone Egypt fails us, if we seek for analogous objects; and it is competent to allege, for such present failure, at least four sufficient reasons, if rightly we may guess them. First, it is very possible that as the magnificent Egyptian could not, from natural causes, produce this rocky balance on anything approaching to an equal scale of grandeur with his other deifications of the patriarchal religion, he might be bold enough to reject it altogether. Secondly, the desolating fury of Cambyses, which is known to have been to old Egypt what the tornado is to a West Indian grove of canes, may well have wiped out all such tottering vestigia. If an intoxicated lot of sea-faring idiots could avail to overthrow the Cornish wonder, (a mass of ninety tons,) how should not the Persian madman, with his thousands, utterly erase those lightly balanced rocks? He might in a great measure be powerless against the temple and the pyramid, but the logan-stone could not withstand the fury of that despotic hurricane against old Egypt's gods; and once dislocated from their pivots, no human will or power, from those days to these of Mehemet Ali's successor, has since been exerted for their hypothetic restoration. Our third reason is, that, to a probable conjecture, the rocking-stone is of comparatively recent origin: Apollonius, and Ptolemy, and Pliny, are chronological children to the Pharaohs, and to pristine Druidism; and we would argue that these symptoms of jugglery and priestcraft inferred a late-in-time decline of traditionary truths. Additionally and lastly, it is possible, that the artificial loganstone may well have been suggested by freaks of nature upon rocky shores, which the priest of Luxor or Lycopolis could never have chanced to see. They seldom or never occur but where nature has all but, if not actually, set the example. Near the celebrated Boskenna logan of Cornwall, a mass of rock like a hay-stack, easily moved by a child's hand, albeit now with peril kept in its position by dint of oak and iron-our own eyes took notice of several mighty rocks, nearly in a state of insulation from the effects of weather eating away all but the weighthardened central point of gravity; one in particular there is, a genuine logan, movable with some slight difficulty, and manifestly a natural, not an artificial consequence: this is a perpendicular pillar of granite, leaning near to the cliff-side, and locally called the Lady's rock. At the Land's End, we pointed out to the master of the "first and last" house in England, to what lucrative use a chisel

might be applied at the base of a certain huge rock, nearly decomposed at bottom, (much more deeply than the Cheesering of St. Clare's,) and which required only a little dangerous chipping, to become a prime opposition to Boskenna. If ever the Druids poised logans, it was, to our guessing, in this shrewd way, the good and wise way of helping nature; in other and truer words, getting of great nature all the help we can.

Among the hurly-burly of immense rocks to the westward of St. Michael's Mountbig as houses, and flung together as carelessly as if they were a pavier's heap of macadamized morsels-are several, dropped by volcanic or Neptunic power, all but upon the equipoise. At Drewsteignton we visited a rocky mass, eighteen feet long, ten high, and fifteen wide, which had manifestly toppled down from a neighboring hill, covered with similar boulders; and this, to our notion, was an accidental case of logan: and near Monmouth is the Buckstone, a mass of large dimensions, similarly accidental as a rockingstone, we doubt not, although there are plenty of evidences all around that the Druids had adopted it for a centre of their operations. Neither of these logans-the one on the very edge of a rapid river, the other stopping short on the beetling verge of a hill-could have been man's doing. And in a secluded glen near the iron-works in South Wales, we have rocked a beautiful miniature logan-stone of some ten tons weight, which, from the utter absence of Druidism in its neighborhood, and from the numerous fragments of shattered cliff lying round it, we take to be nature's work, and not man's. To our own judgment, then, after some observation and experience in such matters, we think that the one great and sufficient reason why Egypt has no loganstones is, because nature did not place them there. Man's hand never (in despite of Borlase we say it) originally set up those mighty stones of trial, although he might have shrewdly aided time in abrading away the bases, and have abetted superstition by arranging that force should be impotent on all the sides but one. That the Druid came to them, is as true as that Mahomet went to the hill; but they could not have come to the Druid at his will any readier than the hill to Mahomet: that rock basins, and arranged stones, and other intimations of man's mind occur round them, is equally a verity; but the superstitious populace would naturally rally round their crafty priests on the site of such earthly miracles. We at least pretend