106 SOME NOTES ON ARBOR LOW. 
how foolish it would be to attempt to give dates on the authority 
of single articles. ‘The Derbyshire oatcake, once so universally 
used, has had its day, but it is still to be found in the Peak, side 
by side with the wheaten loaf. Croquet still lingers and dies hard, 
notwithstanding all the counter attractions of lawn tennis; and if 
weapons were now buried with us, the mallet and the racquet 
might be found side by side. Or to take a graver instance, archery 
was practically used in warfare by English bowmen, several 
centuries after the almost general use of gunpowder, both in 
cannons and muskets. Therefore, the remains of a bow in an 
English interment would not prove that it was of fourteenth or 
thirteenth century date, for it might be sixteenth or even 
seventeenth. 
The contents, then, of barrows that may be connected with 
Megalithic remains are really no positive guide to their date. 
Those who desire to consider them pre-historic can of course 
point, if they will, to flint chips or bronze weapons ; but those, on 
the contrary, who consider them historic are équally entitled to 
point to iron helmets, Christian ornaments, or Roman coins. To 
argue, as is often done, that all instruments or traces of later ages 
have been added in subsequent interments, or that Roman coins 
have been dropped and stamped in by the tourists or picnic 
parties of those days, seems to me almost unworthy of serious 
discussion. 
That rude stone monuments such as this of Arbor Low were 
Druidical temples, is an assertion much easier to make than in 
any way to prove. ‘There is not a solitary sentence in any of the 
classical or ancient authors, upon whom our whole knowledge of 
the Druids rests, that directly or indirectly in any way connects 
the Druids with the stone temples or stones of any kind. Had 
such temples existed in the days of Czesar or Tacitus they could 
hardly have failed to be mentioned. Before 1700, no one ever 
dreamt of such monuments as Stonehenge and Avebury being 
pre-historic. Dr. Stukeley’s silly fictions about Druids and 
serpent worship, and the serpent-like dispositions of stones 
extending over miles of hill and dale, are wholly due to his own 
—_—" 
