have been carefully surveyed by Sir R. C. Hoare. The conquests it was intended to include seem to have been, first, the Vale of Pewsey; secondly, the mineral district of the Mendip Hills; and, thirdly, the country lying between the range and marshes of the Parret. Ptolemy gives us Winchester, Bath, and Ilchester, as the three principal towns of the Belgic Province. If we run a line along the Wansdyke from Berkshire to the Channel, then along the coast to the Parret, then up that river eastward till we strike the southern borders of Wiltshire, and then follow the first Belgic boundary across Dorsetshire to the sea, we shall have defined, with tolerable accuracy, the northern and western boundaries, which Roman geographers assigned to the Belgæ proper. It will be seen that the Wansdike bends to the south, as if to avoid Avebury, and approaches close to, but does not include Bath. It seems reasonable to infer, that when the line of demarcation was drawn, the Dobuni insisted on the retention of their ancient temple, and of their hot baths; and if this inference be a just one, another and a more important one seems naturally to follow. Assuming that the Belge were thus excluded from Avebury, is it not likely that they would provide a locus consecratus' at some central point within their own border— a place for their judicial assemblies, like the Gaulish temple 'in finibus Carnutum quæ regio totius Galliæ media habetur?' May not Stonehenge have been the substitute so provided?" Dr. Guest further gives it as his opinion that Stonehenge "could not have been built much later than the year 100 B.C., and in all probability was not built more than a century or two earlier." Whenever it was built, it must have been when the builders were at peace amongst themselves, and with their neighbours the Damnonii, if the smaller stones came from Devonshire; and with the Ordovices, if they were brought from North Wales. And if it were asked, How could the Belga procure these stones, which were brought from beyond the Wansdyke, the Belgic limit? it might be supposed (with the Rev. W. L. Bowles), that the great line of Wansdyke was thrown up by mutual consent, and that the Britons, upon the condition that their holy precincts should be undefiled, and their great temple left uninjured, might grant the Belgians the right to convey, to their own district, the stones to raise the temple to their own God.' The writer would conclude this section with the words of his deceased friend, Dr. Thurnam, in which he fully concurs: "The builders of Stonehenge, we believe, in common with the learned Master of Gonvile and Caius College, to have been the Belgæ, or possibly a confederacy of the whole of those Belgic tribes, by whom, at a no very long time before our era, a great part of South Britain was conquered and settled. Whether the invading Belgae brought with them from Gaul the fashions of more elaborate forms of tumuli, our knowledge of those in North-Eastern France does not enable us to determine. There have been many important explorations of the chambered barrows and dolmens of France; but it does not appear that any zealous and munificent antiquary has demonstrated the form, the structure, and contents of the barrows of the bronze period of that country, in like manner as our Wiltshire baronet has those of this part of England. In the absence of such information, we incline to the opinion of their indigenous origin, and conclude that the bell and disc-shaped tumuli were invented on the spot by the Belgic builders of Stonehenge, whence their fashion was gradually distributed over those parts of Britain to which Belgic influence and authority extended. The erection of circular barrows over the distinguished dead seems to have been continued as late as the conquest of South Britain under Claudius and his successors; there being no proof that the islanders were in any material degree Romanized in their customs before the time of Agricola; to which period their adoption of Roman funeral usages may in all likelihood be referred." * 1 Hermes Britannicus, p. 126. 110 How were these Stones brought and set up? O the visitor of the ruins of Stonehenge who is aware that the stones composing it have been brought from a distance, three interesting questions naturally suggest themselves; 1, How were the stones brought here? 2, How were they shaped and prepared with their mortises and tenons? 3, How were they raised into their upright, and transverse positions? Let us see whence and how they can have been brought here before the use of metal, and the means and appliances with which man in more recent times has been so fully supplied. Having selected a block of proper dimensions from the neighbourhood of Marlborough,1 it would then be the work of the party to be employed in its removal to cut down with their flint or horn axes, poles sufficiently strong and long to serve as levers; then to provide themselves with wooden wedges; and lastly to cut trees, of proper size, into proper lengths, for rollers upon which the stone should run.3 Having raised their stone upon the rollers, they would, with their "Many of them [the sarsen, or as he calls them, sarsdon, stones] are mighty great ones, and particularly those in Overton Wood. Of these kind of stones are framed the two stupendous antiquities of Aubury and Stone-heng."Aubrey's Nat. Hist. of Wilts (Britton's edition, p. 44). Dr. Charleton, too, believed that the Stonehenge stones came "from the fields adjoining Aibury or Rockly," p. 44. 2 Mr. E. T. Stevens, in his " Flint Chips," at page 68, gives us an interesting account of the modern use of stone tools. 66 Many persons,' ," he says, "are loth to believe that rude stone hatchets have been used for cutting down trees, and still less that planks and boats can have been made with similar tools." He goes on "to cite some of the uses to which tools of stone, bone, horn and shell have been applied in modern times. . . The axe used formerly by the natives of Vancouver's Island in felling the largest tree, which they did without the use of fire, was made of elk-horn, and was shaped like a chisel. The natives held it as we use the chisel, and struck the handle with a stone not unlike a dumb-bell, and weighing about two pounds." 3 Strabo, Geogr., iv., p. 280, says: "The Forests (of the Britons) are their towns; for they fence in a spacious circuit with felled trees, and build themselves huts there, and stables for their cattle, (which they occupy) for no long time." levers, shove it along, levelling and smoothing the uneven ground before them as best they could, and placing relays of rollers continually in advance. By this means, after much toil and time, they would land their stone at its destination. Let us suppose, however, that in the intercourse with eastern people, trading for tin or otherwise, the builders of Stonehenge had become acquainted with the use of bronze and of the rope, they would then have been at a greater advantage. Perhaps the bronze implements might not be able to do much more for them than the flint, but the rope would be an immense assistance, in enabling them to bring so much draught-power of men to their aid, and possibly of beasts, if the bos longifrons and the horse, (whose remains are found in the barrows,) were to be found in sufficient numbers on the downs and their neighbourhood. At Rome, when the writer was there in the winter of 1865-6, it was amusing to see the primitive manner in which the large blocks of Carrara marble were transported from the Tiber to the artists' studios. Sir George Head, in his "Tour of many days in Rome," vol. ii., p. 397, thus describes the slow and clumsy operation: "A sledge of sufficient size and strength having been constructed for the purpose, consisting simply of a low framework of stout timber, connected by transverse pieces and supported on wooden runners, such as are used for the transport of heavy merchandise over the snow in the roads of North America, the block of marble, divested previously of all its unnecessary bulk, was laid upon it, which preliminary part of the operation, however, I did not see performed. But the manner of putting the sledge in motion, which I did see, was as follows: in the first place, at the distance of sixty or seventy yards in front of the object a hole was made in the ground, and an iron crowbar not less than twelve inches in circumference, inserted in the hole as a point to haul upon, including a massive triangular frame to support a capstan lashed close to the crowbar. A block and pulley having been fixed to the sledge, and another block and pulley to the frame of the capstan, the rope was in the the first instance made fast to the sledge, and finally once more carried forward and rove with a double turn round the shaft of the capstan, so that as the shaft revolved the rope was coiled on the ground by a man, who, with the end in his hand, sat upon the capstan-frame below. There were four arms to the windlass, each manned on ordinary occasions, by a couple of men, and by four men, which number I never happened to see exceeded, in case of an acclivity. In order to obtain an uniform surface for the machine to pass over, there were used, instead of rollers, wooden planks, covered with soft soap; and the services of two men were constantly required, one to soap the boards, and the other to remove them from the rear to the front as the sledge proceeded. The operation thus performed by successive removals of the crowbar to a farther distance, so soon as the rope became expended and coiled, occupied no less, with the exclusion of Sundays and saints' days, than a whole month, and the motion was in fact so slow as to be hardly perceptible." The distance from the Marmorata on the banks of the Tiber to the destination of this block of marble in the Via del Babuino, would be under two miles. Herodotus tells us (II., c. 124) that Cheops, when he succeeded to the throne closed the temples, and forbade the Egyptians to offer sacrifice, compelling them instead to labour, one and all, in his service (for the erection of his pyramid). Some were required to drag blocks of stone down to the Nile from the quarries in the Arabian range of hills; others received the blocks after they had been conveyed in boats across the river, and drew them to the range of hills called the Lybian. A hundred thousand men laboured constantly, and were relieved every three months by a fresh lot. In Canon Rawlinson's translation of Herodotus, and in Sir Gardner Wilkinson's "Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians " (iii., 328, ed. 1837), may be seen wood-cuts of the representation of a colossus "The ancient Assyrians and Egyptians have recorded on their walls by paintings and sculpture the method employed in transporting these masses. Apparently the lever was the only mechanical power used, and with unlimited supplies of human labour this would be the most direct and expeditious implement; but it is probable that other mechanical aids were employed where stones such as obelisks had to be lifted. From a carved slab, moreover, which formed part of the wall panels of the palace of Sardanapalus we learn that the pulley was known in a simple form."-Sir John Hawkshaw's Address delivered before the British Association, at Bristol, Aug, 25th, 1875. |