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PREHISTORIC PUBLIC SPIRIT 329

much of the tombs of their ancestors, placing them in prominent positions and resorting to them for worship. So in Cornwall these burial-places were placed in commanding positions on mountain-tops and the summit of cliffs close to the sea, or by well-worn paths, plain for all folks to see. Many a cairn

"Immense, with blind walls columnless, a tomb

For earlier kings whose names have passed away."

Our ancestors, who raised these enduring Cornish monuments in those dim distant ages, may not have been so well educated as we are. They did not know so much. They had no accumulations of book-learning to draw upon. Their horizon was a very limited one. They knew not the sciences, with perhaps the exception of a slight elementary knowledge of astronomy. They had not the advantages we have-if advantages they are. They had no free, and certainly no compulsory, education, and technical schools were not, to teach everything from gardening to photography, and yet they knew something. They knew how to erect some of the most permanent monuments in the world. The stone circles, the tumuli, the cromlechs, the beehive huts, and in later ages the crosses and menhirs, have endured when the memory of the builders has completely vanished. They built rudely, simply, it is true, but with a grandly heroic spirit a united public spirit too, which has resulted in their monuments-those that in our modern highly civilised times we have not hacked to pieces, dug up, levelled, dilapidated-standing the test of long-drawn-out centuries of time, and still are with us to-day. I venture to say that we have no recent monuments which will endure for a thousand years or more, pitilessly exposed to wind and weather, as some of these Cornish antiquities have.

And we are now destroying more than we are creating— that is the tendency of the age and the sad part of the story. We allow these grand ancient monuments to go to destruction, and put not out a finger to stay the hand of the destroyer. We cannot replace them. We cannot, with all our modern science and art, even suggest substitutes for them. Anything we attempted to build beside them would appear tawdry, effeminate, and be in comparison

ephemeral. Compare even our modern churches and chapels of cheaply cut stone or badly baked bricks, slate roof, and thin, cold walls, with the grand, reposeful, worshipful, solid, and enduring Cornish parish churches of past ages. Is any comparison possible? Christian Britain might well learn a lesson from her heathen ally Japan, and show some reverence for the "spirits of the dead" by carefully preserving their memorials, and a beginning might well be made in the richest antiquarian county-Cornwall.

Antiquity inspires insatiable curiosity. To re-enter the most distant time, in order to conceive how the earth looked in its youth and in what way men supported the life which civilisation has since rendered so complicated, requires curiosity and also a continual effort of the imagination. Antiquarian studies, so far from being dry-as-dust as is still popularly misunderstood, are high up among the most intellectual and imaginative-delightfully resourceful and absorbing pursuits.

When we look at huge cromlechs, at these vast circles, accurately planned-though here and there unfortunately a stone is missing, like a tooth from a giant's jaw-at those colossal monoliths, the presence of every one of them in such desolate spots is little short of a miracle. They suggest unheard-of labour. How did they get there? Without patent rollers, mighty derricks, iron winches, chains and pulleys, without the simplest mechanical contrivances we so take for granted in these modern days-no steamengine, no electric motive power-how were so huge masses transported to these desolate wind-swept heights and commons in Cornwall? How many yoke of oxen, how many toiling, straining hundreds of men must it have taken to erect the least of them? What long-drawn-out periods of time did their erection take? What submission to authority, what servile or superstitious fear or dread of the unknown must have animated the workers. No driver's whip could have urged on to completion such a gigantic task; no richest guerdon of jewels, gold, or skins offered by affluent monarch or exalted priest of those days could have repaid the toil. Yet there these stone circles, monoliths, menhirs, cromlechs stand, the wonder of succeeding generations of all religious opinions, belief or unbelief

ADVANTAGES OF SUPERSTITION

331

altars maybe many of them "To the Unknown God." Monarchies, republics, systems have grown up, matured, vanished. Slaughter and battles have raged round them. Cruelties, intolerances, terrible superstitions, emotional outbursts of divers sorts have they seen since first they stood up mute, impassive, sphinx-like, facing high heaven. Through all those ages have they held their tongue. Silent then as now are they. They reveal no secrets, and the purport and lesson of their being is as insoluble as ever. creeds, beliefs, aspirations which inspired their construction we know nothing about. We may grope, delve, theorisewe cannot explain, and I doubt if we shall ever be able to.

The

That the people who planned and built these monuments were superstitious is, I think, beyond the shadow of a doubt. Superstition was necessary for their inception. Superstition is probably a matter of degree and extent, not of past, for all men have in all ages possessed in varying degree a sympathy with the invisible; but the people who laboriously planned and erected these stone circles, huge menhirs, and mounds were certainly more superstitious than many of the other ancient peoples who have left little, if any, remains behind them. The early inherent superstition of the Celtic nations naturally crystallised into fervour when directed into Christian channels. In superstition always lies the possibility of religion, and the Celtic nations are certainly among the most deeply and honestly religious the world has ever seen. Whence came this most characteristic feature of Celtic civilisation? That is a question we can no more answer than we can that of the origin of this curiously vital and irrepressibly active branch of the human race.

About three-quarters of a mile due west of the Lanyon Quoit are the remains of another, known as Lower Lanyon Quoit. Two stones are all that now remain, the covering stone and one of the supporters-the others having been split up and carried away for building purposes.

The following notice of its discovery is given in the Archæologia, Vol. XIX, p. 228 (1803), in a letter from the Rev. Malachi Hitchins to the Rt. Hon. Sir Joseph Banks, Bart., K.B., P.R.S., and F.A.S. :—

“This cromlêh was found a few years since by the following incident. The gentleman who owns the estate of Lalyon,

happening to be overtaken by a shower of rain in walking through his fields, took shelter behind a bank of earth and stones, and remarking that the earth was rich, he thought it might be useful for a compost. Accordingly he sent his servants soon after to carry it off, when, having removed near a hundred cart-loads, they observed the supporters of a cromlêh, from which the cover-stone was slipped off on the south side, but still leaning against them. These supporters include a rectangular space open only at the north end, their dimensions being of a very extraordinary size, viz. that forming the eastern side being ten feet and a half long, that on the west nine feet, with a small one added to complete the length of the other side, and the stone shutting up the south end about five feet wide. The cover-stone is about thirteen feet and a half by ten feet and a half; but its length and the height of the supporters cannot be exactly ascertained, as they are inserted in the ground, the present height being about five feet. This cromlêh is dissimilar to all others found in this county, which have small supporters, and the area under the cover-stone open on all sides; whereas this, when the cover was on, was shut up almost quite close at the top and on three sides, having only the entrance at the north end open, and therefore appears to resemble Kitts-Cotty-House in Kent, though the dimensions of this are larger. As soon as the gentleman observed it to be a cromlêh, he ordered his men to dig under it, where they soon found a broken urn with many ashes, and going deeper they took up about half of a skull, the thighbones and most of the other bones of a human body, lying in a promiscuous state and in such a disordered manner as fully proved that the grave had been opened before; and this is the more certain because the flat stones which formed the grave, or what Dr. Borlase calls the kist-vaen, i.e. stone chest, and a flat stone about six feet long, which probably lay at the bottom, had all been removed out of their places. The skull and some other bones were carried into the gentleman's house, and shown to his friends as curiosities, but were afterwards re-interred in the same spot inclosed in a box."

This account is interesting, because here was a cromlech actually covered by a mound of earth, and also

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