Stone Monuments of Brittany. 23 
as they now are, it is evident that they were once far more so, 
for the alignments are in places interrupted by cultivated fields, 
and isolated stones that were too large for removal show that 
the lines were once continuous. All the stones are of granite ; 
the subsoil of the country is also granite, and the land exceed- 
ingly poor; and it is doubtless owing to the barren nature of 
the country that the monuments have been preserved in the 
numbers that they fortunately have been. It is certain that the 
dolmens were places of burial, and were all originally covered 
by tumuli or cairns; some few retain their original tumulus 
intact, as, for example, Mont St. Michel, at Carnac, and the 
fine tumulus on Gavr-Inis, or Goat Island, in the Morbihan 
Sea. Both of these were carefully explored by a society having 
its headquarters at Vannes, the capital of the department, and 
the various articles found in them, and in other dolmens, are in 
the museum there; they consist of exquisitely formed cells of 
jade, jadeite, nephrite, and similar stone, some of which are the 
finest specimens of the kind known; there are also some fine 
necklaces of a greenish blue stone like turquoise. 
In the Gavr-Inis tumulus, the sepulchral chamber and the 
gallery leading to it have the upright stones at the sides, and 
which support the roof, richly decorated with various designs 
sculptured on the surface. The arrangement of this ornamenta- 
tion shows that it must have been done before the stones were 
placed in position; on one stone is a recess deeply cut into the 
substance of the granite, leaving two columns in front; it is 
about 2 ft. long and 4 in. deep behind the columns, which are 
4 ft. high and 13 im. thick, and there is a trough at the bottom . 
of the recess 13 in. deep. 
The human bones found in the ahniabaes of these dolmens all 
showed that they had been burned, and cremation seems to have 
been generally practised; but some small stone chambers have 
been found called ‘‘ Kist-Vaens,” each containing a body lying 
on its side in a doubled-up position; one such is preserved in 
the museum at Carnac. 
Others also of the dolmens have designs and hieroglyphics 
sculptured on their stones, as we shall notice later on, and the 
question has been raised ‘if it is possible that they could have 
been done with stone tools. Experiments have been tried, and 
it is found that such designs can be worked on the surface of 
granite with tools of diorite or a similar stone, but not with 
tools of flint, which, though harder and bearing a better cutting 
edge, is not so tough as diorite, and breaks in use on such a 
hard stone as granite, just as stonemasons of the present day 
use steel tools of a softer temper for granite than for limestone. 
Another large dolmen near Locmariaker, called ‘‘ The Table 
of the Merchants’’ (photographs shown), has the end stone 
