62 



builders, no Druids nor Skalds, piling rocks like these, 

 with engineering fit to baffle a Brunei. This is all pure 

 nature. This massive block was doubtless left resting 

 here on its four certain props at the same time, whenever 

 that may have been, when its brother blocks were torn 

 from their parent beds and tossed at random in a thousand 

 spots, as "\ve see them all around. And since that tre- 

 mendous period, it may have ))een before the human era, 

 this block has lain secure and strong, on a foundation that 

 looks as if it might yield to the first tempest. 



The geological records of the world are nowise poor in 

 rocking stones and remarkable boulders. The mother 

 country has many very curious ones. The Buckstone in 

 Gloucestershire, and the Cheese Ring in Cornwall, are 

 familiar to all tourists through England. Likewise, 

 Hitchcock has told us of notable instances in our own 

 state ; a double one in Barre, anothej*, vaster still, in 

 Taunton, and others nearer home. But Phaeton Kock is 

 something different from all these, something perfectly 

 unique and instructive. It is as though Nature — in the 

 midst of all that prodigious process, by which huge 

 masses were hurled hither and thither with Titanic force, 

 and granite and porphyry were ground down to clay and 

 sand — had paused to play, in childlike simplicity, Avith 

 these five stones, piling them as an infant's block-house, 

 and leaving them to make us wonder, ages after, at the 

 grand stability and perfection of the rare toy she had 

 constructed. 



In Sithney Parish, Cornwall, lay once the celebrated 

 ''Logan Stone." Says an old writer, "it was so nicely 

 poised on another stone that a little child could move 

 it, and all travellers who passed this way desired to see 

 it. But Shrubsall, Cromwell's Governor of Pendenis, 

 with much ado caused it to be undermined, to the great 



