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pared to a colossal three-legged milking-stool. This lies two miles from Madron, after passing, at one and three-quarters miles, a road going off on the left to New Bridge and St. Just. It is situated about twenty yards from the road on the right hand, and is the most striking example of this class of monument I have seen in the Land's End district. Lanyon means the enclosure on the down." The top stone was thrown down by a violent storm in 1816 (or 1815?), but was replaced some years after with the same tackle used to reinstate the Logan Stone (see p. 132). The top slab formerly was sufficiently raised above the ground for a horseman to ride under it. After the accident-which some say was actually caused by lightning-the uprights were cut down to their present height of about five feet. The photograph I took shows the arrangement of the supporting stones, which are three in number. The topping stone measures 17 feet 2 inches by 8 feet, and is of irregular outline.

According to Dr. Borlase, Lanyon Quoit was in a long barrow, 70 feet by 20 feet and 2 feet high, in his day, but the form of a barrow nowadays has gone.

About the middle of the eighteenth century a dream induced the owner of the property to dig beneath it, and directly under the quoit a simple grave was discovered, cut in the natural soil, without side-stones or covering.

As this ancient Cornish mound now stands it is an example of unscientific reconstruction, for the modern renovators obviously replaced the stones in different positions from those that they formerly occupied.

In these days we rather desire to place our cemeteries in out-of-the-way spots, apart from the busy haunts of living men and thoroughfares. But among the ancients, far from the sight of tombs discouraging the living, they were placed in the high road to kindle emulation. The young were thus constantly reminded of the illustrious dead, who seemed silently to bid them imitate their glories. The Appian Way at Rome is a great thoroughfare, and one long-drawn-out burial-ground. Here repose the remains of some of the most illustrious Romans. Cicero assures us that there were buried Scipio, Metellus, and Servilius, and no doubt the Way is thickly strewn with the graves of many other famous men and women. The Japanese make

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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