appended, and the British King then reigning is Aurelius Ambrosius. The print in Gough's Camden, from which the woodcut at page 46 was taken, is not faithfully copied; but as the generally rude and inaccurate character of the original sketch is sufficiently shown, it seems to be hardly worth while to have it re-engraved. THE STONES OF THE INNER CIRCLE AND INNER ELLIPSE. (Page 59.) The great puzzle about Stonehenge is in connection with these smaller stones, which are foreign to the neighbourhood. We cannot be far wrong in believing that the entire structure was intended to serve as a temple for religious worship; and we know whence the large stones came, and how " with much ado and pains" they could be set up; but we are in perplexity about these primitive stones from Wales or Cornwall. Were they brought here, in the first instance, in ignorance of the existence of the sarsen stones in the neighbourhood? This is not likely. Were they brought here to decorate the interior of the temple, as we should employ rare and costly marble from a distance to adorn the interior of a church? This again is not likely, as although by shaping and polishing they might be rendered more comely, they are at present in no way ornamental. For the merely structural purposes of making a circle and ellipse, sarsen stones of the same height and size would have been equally serviceable. We are forced to believe that some special religious value was attached to stones of this particular kind, and that no other stones could have supplied their place in a building of this character. That medicinal and other virtues were believed to be the property of particular stones we know from Pliny (Book xxxvi.) and others; and Aubrey tells us (p. 35) that pieces of these stones were put into wells "to drive away the Toades." It is not unlikely that enquiries into the superstitious value, which has at different times and in different places, become associated with particular stones, will render it almost certain to us that these smaller Stonehenge stones were held in such high regard as to make the trouble of bringing them from a great distance a matter of no concern in comparison with the importance of having them there, as an integral portion of the sacred fane. THE WORD "SARRASIN." (Page 69.) Dr. Stukeley says (p. 63 of reprint) that: "the Cornish men universally suppose that the Jews are the people who first work't in their rocks for tin; and in old neglected tin-works they find some of their tools. The workmen call them attal sarazin, the Jews' cast off works in their Hebrew speech, says Norden." On the Jews in Cornwall, see Mr. Max Müller's "Chips from a German Workshop," vol. iii. DESTRUCTION OF STONES AT STONEHENGE. (Page 77.) Lord Herbert (then the Right Hon. Sidney Herbert) stated in his speech at the Society's meeting, at Salisbury, in 1855, that he believed that some years ago, a portion of Stonehenge was consumed in the reparation of the roads." (See "Wilts Arch. & Nat. Hist. Mag." ii., 6.) This can hardly have been the case since 1812, as the plans of Stonehenge which served for the illustration of Sir Richard Hoare's description of it in "Ancient Wilts," require no alteration for the illustration of the present paper, although at an interval of sixty years. There must have been some misapprehension about the stone from which West Amesbury House was built (see page 76), as Mr. Edwards, of Amesbury, in a letter which he has kindly communicated to the writer (dated April 8th, 1876), says, "I have been to West Amesbury, and have carefully examined the stones used in building the house as well as the garden wall, but have not discovered any stones similar to those at Stonehenge. I likewise examined the walls of the old farm-house, on which there is a date of 1680, the old portion of which is partly built with similar stones to that of the house before mentioned." Mr. Edwards mentions the curious fact that the Stonehenge circles and the Friar's Heel are in different Hundreds, the former being in the Hundred of Underditch, and the latter in the Hundred of Amesbury. RE-ERECTION OF THE TRILITHON WHICH FELL IN 1797. (Page 81.) For more than twenty years there has been discussion about the propriety of re-erecting the stones of the trilithon which last fell down. It appears, however, that at a very early period in the present century the same idea had been entertained, but had come to nought. Mr. Britton, in his memoir of Mr. Hatcher, says "that a sum of fifty pounds, which had been subscribed to raise the fallen trilithon at Stonehenge, was, in 1802, employed in exploring some of the numerous barrows of Salisbury Plain." DIGGING AROUND THE "" SLAUGHTERING STONE." There seems to have been some confusion in Sir R. Hoare's mind about this digging around the " Slaughtering Stone," as it appears that it was done by Mr. Cunnington, in 1802, two or three years before his connection with Sir Richard commenced. For "he," in the next line, read "Sir R. Hoare." THE CURSUS. Any one who would visit the west end of the Cursus should go along the road to Shrewton, as far as barrow No. 42, and then cross the road. At a distance of about 300 yards he will come upon this end of the Cursus. One of the barrows upon it is on the down, the other inside the plantation. It will be useless to attempt to trace its boundaries through the plantation. ABSENCE OF ANGLO-SAXON BARROWS FROM THE NEIGHBOURHOOD OF STONEHENGE. (Page 99.) "It is further to be remarked that the few Anglo-Saxon tumuli which have been found in Wiltshire were in the outlying districts and valleys, and not one of them on the barrow-covered hills and VOL. XVI.-NO. XLVI. ૨ plains around Avebury and Stonehenge, the sacred places of an elder race."-Dr. Thurnam, " Archæologia," vol. xliii., p. 287.1 THE BELGIC DITCHES, as described by Dr. T. Wharton, in his " History of Kiddington,” pp. 72, 73, 74. [1815.] "Petty barbarian states, intent only on repelling their neighbours or enlarging their territories, unfurnished with arts or letters, and from their natural ferocity cherishing the most violent jealousies, and destitute of the principles of mutual confidence, possessed no other mode of adjusting their differences and securing their frontiers, than to construct these inartificial bulwarks, serving at once for division and defence, planned on the simplest mechanism, and executed by the mere strength of tumultuary multitudes. "They must be esteemed stupendous operations, not only if we consider their solidity and extent, but the inconveniencies of ground, and impracticabilities of country, over which they were conducted, with a sort of blind but unbaffled perseverance, by the devious and eccentric hand of savage conquest. There is often a kind of barbaric capriciousness even in the irregularities of their course. It frequently happened, that a boundary raised with infinite labour, soon became superfluous, and as new spaces of country gradually fell a prey to the progression of prosperous arms, was included by another on a more comprehensive scale and wider compass. A straight line drawn northward, from the southern coast of England about Dorsetshire and Hampshire, only thirty miles into land, would cut through the curve of no fewer than seven of these boundaries, successively circulating one beyond the other, and which I believe to have been reared by the Belgæ, a formidable colony of the Celts from Gaul, as they gradually extended their victories, and propagated their 2 The six grave-mounds belonging to Ancient Wiltshire, which have been proved upon examination to be Anglo-Saxon, are described in Hoare's "Ancient Wilts," i., 46, 48, 174 (barrow levelled), 234, 235; vol. ii. "Roman Æra,” p. 26. The five secondary Anglo-Saxon interments are described in i., 79, 100, 113, 194, 236. acquisitions, over Dorsetshire, Wiltshire, and Hampshire. All these seven valla describe the most desultory track, but proceed in windings nearly parallel-a proof of their reference to each other, and that the aboriginal Britons did not suffer the invaders to advance with any degree of precipitation. "The most perfect is that near Woodyates, in Dorsetshire: and which originating, as I presume, from the river Stour, or the seashore, about Christchurch, in Hampshire, appears conspicuous, like the elliptic on one of the hemispheres of a globe, over the long and broad declivity of Bladon Hill, above Marton, in Wiltshire, and intersecting, with a prodigious ridge and foss in almost original preservation, the Roman road called the Ikenild Street, within a furlong of Woodyates, pushes through the woody tracts of Cranbourne Chase, and seems to terminate at Grovely Wood, within five miles of Salisbury. This very remarkable rampart is unquestionably Celtic, being evidently antecedent to the Romans; for at the intersection above-mentioned, the substance of the Ikenild, that most dubious and unintelligible of the Pretorian ways, yet here retaining the genuine and massy remains of a pebbly and flinty stratum cemented with chalk, is continued in a line across or through it, as was plainly perceptible when the London turnpike-road was lately made. Had the rampart and dyke been posterior, the Roman materials would have been torn up and destroyed. And I must add that near Woodyates Lane the Roman road penetrates the centre of a barrow, one of a numerous group. These barrows, apparently connected with the rampart, are as indisputably Celtic, and not Roman; because the Romans, more pious than modern Christians, would not have suffered such a profanation to have been committed on a sepulchre of their ancestors. Nor, in after times, would the Saxons or Danes have formed a barrow on a public way. Wansdyke or Gwhahan-Dyke, the ditch of division, which also interferes with a probable Roman. road at Hedington, and in the midst of which is situated the town of Devizes, anciently a Celtic station, is the last frontier of the encroachments of the Belga northward. Here a stand was made between the contending barbarians: and as Wansdyke runs between Stonehenge and Abury, probably those two mysterious monuments, |