,3„. SOME NEW BOOKS. 549 



its advantages. A guide-book account was not so much wanted, as 

 we have those of King and Baddeley, and the work would probably 

 have been more useful if it had followed the lines of a general treat- 

 ment of the moor and its antiquities. It must, however, be admitted 

 that the general and critical parts of Mr. Page's work are the least 

 satisfactory. Let us, for example, take his remarks on the geology. 

 His fond and frequent use of the word " trap " is symptomatic. We 

 are not, therefore, so surprised when we read, on p. 13, that the 

 granite is often porphyritic "from the presence of felspar." He 

 quotes Mr. Ussher's hopeless theory that Dartmoor is a laccolite, 

 without telling us that its author has abandoned that view. Another 

 point which shows that the author has not fully grasped the signifi- 

 cance of recent results, is that he quotes the theory that the schor- 

 laceous and porphyritic granites and the elvans form a threefold 

 series, without any hint that this has been rendered quite untenable 

 by the acceptance of schorl as a decomposition product. We much 

 wish that on p. 14 he would have given us some definite clue as to 

 the exact locality " where no distinction could be drawn between 

 granite and ordinary slaty material "; we always thought that the 

 most famous feature of the contact-metamorphism around Dartmoor 

 was the comparatively slight alteration the neighbouring rocks had 

 undergone. 



The Archaeology is, as a rule, more reliable ; the author's views 

 are generally marked by common sense, except when, as on pp. 136, 

 1 37, he treats Ferguson's notions seriously. He is profoundly agnostic 

 on all archaeological problems, which is no doubt in the main justified 

 by our ignorance of the facts that ought to be determinable. A com- 

 parison of Mr. Page's crude maps of the Merivale antiquities — great 

 advance though they be on those of Sir Gardner Wilkinson — with 

 such surveys as Petrie's of Stonehenge, shows how far our knowledge of 

 these lags behind that of the Wiltshire monuments. Nevertheless, 

 the author entertains little doubt of the pre-Roman age of the stone 

 avenues and circles, the hut circles, the trilithons and the " clapper" 

 bridges, the last of which are the chief of the unique features of 

 Dartmoor. The bronze weapons and amber ornaments of the few 

 barrows that have been well opened remove all doubt as to the 

 occupation of the area in the Bronze age, and of the stream washing 

 for tin that must then have been carried on. The general resem- 

 blance of the stone circles to those of Stonehenge, Karnac, and North 

 Africa serve also to demonstrate that these are of approximately 

 the same age as the Wiltshire series, which certainly date from the 

 Bronze age. It does, however, seem difficult at first to believe that 

 the clapper bridges have the same enormous antiquity ; but their 

 foundations are, as a rule, more substantial than those of the Stone- 

 henge trilithons, and as most of these have survived, there seems no 

 reason why the bridges should not also have done so. The rudeness 

 of workmanship, the massiveness of the stones used, and the asso- 

 ciation of the bridges with the ancient British trackway, and groups 

 of hut circles, all agree with the early age that is generally assigned 

 to the bridges. The accompanying view of a typical example at 

 Postbridge, which we owe to the courtesy of the publishers, is a good 

 specimen of Mr. Alfred Dawson's beautiful drawings that adorn the 

 volume. 



In regard to the rock basins, we are glad to find Mr. Page 

 admitting that these owe their existence to natural causes, dismissing 

 the view of their artificial origin, which has been so strongly urged by 

 Sir Gardner Wilkinson. The argument of this author — that they 



