6/2 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



top of the decorated face of the stone has been shaped into a pedi- 

 ment rising to a kind of base supporting a cross on which is sculp- 

 tured in bold relief a Christ holding a cup in each hand. The execu- 

 tion of these figures is rude, but the style of some of the designs re- 

 lates them to the age of Louis XIII, or the beginning of the seven- 

 teenth century. The paint with which they are colored can not but 

 suffer from the weather and has to be renewed at times. It looks 

 now comparatively fresh. 



Among the dolmens that have been sanctified by the church, 

 some have been used as supports for the cross, and others have been 

 transformed into altars or converted into chapels. Besides the 

 cathedrals of Chartres and Puy, which according to local traditions 

 were built over dolmens very anciently held in reverence, many ex- 

 amples may be cited of megalithic structures which bear the marks 

 of the more or less important modifications they have suffered in 

 view of their changed destination. The partly fallen dolmen of 

 Cruz-Molten, not far from Carnac, bears a very simple stone cross 

 that takes the place of an ancient historical one, of which a view 

 appears on a picture made in 1845. Another monument consists of 

 a slab which is supposed to have belonged to a dolmen, that rests 

 upon four pillars supposed to have been borrowed from neighboring 

 ruins, and supports a cross apparently more recent. The monument 

 supposed to be the tomb of St. Ethbin at Port Mort, which people 

 having kidney troubles pass under on certain days to be cured, was a 

 dolmen, for which a table supported by four small columns was sub- 

 stituted about 1875. So probably was the Grosse Pierre of Ymase, 

 a roughly squared slab with a cross cut in one of its corners, sustained 

 by two stone supports, and under which people passed to be cured of 

 various diseases. A rectangular slab resting on four large square 

 pillars at the entrance of the cemetery of Arcy-Saint-Restitue came 

 from a dolmen and is the scene of a sort of religious ceremony. St. 

 Margaret's stone in the commune of Petit Lessac is a large, heavy slab 

 of rough granite resting on four columns of the eleventh or twelfth 

 century, with a stone altar underneath. It was once covered by a 

 chapel, the walls of which could till recently be traced on the surface 

 of the ground. 



At Canges de Onis, near Oviedo, in the northeast of Spain, is a 

 little church, built probably in the tenth or eleventh century upon a 

 tumulus of broken stones covering a dolmen. The dolmen, in the 

 shape of a circular chamber with a passage leading to it, is composed of 

 fifteen supports and four tables. It constitutes a part of the church, 

 and was formerly used as a crypt. It has been explored at different 

 times, and a few articles of stone and copper have been found in it. 

 Pere Carvallo, a writer of the seventeenth century, says that in his 



