Excursion on Friday, Auffust 20t/i. 157 



circles of small^ irregular, round, unhewn stones, and between and 

 outside these, other circles or parts of circles of tooled stones, squared, 

 and provided, some with mortise- holes and others with tenons. 

 Was it not probable that the unhewn stones were the older of the 

 two series ? Elsewhere they found cromlechs and monoliths, 

 with no history attached to them, at most a vague tradition that 

 they were erected before the use of tools was known. At Avebury 

 they had traces of cii'cles of rude, large, unhewn stones : here, at 

 Stonehenge, were small stones of this class associated with large 

 wrought ones. How and when were these stones wrought? They 

 must be posterior to lanhewn stones, and the latter must be attributed 

 to a period before the Roman invasion : he defied anyone to produce 

 evidence of the existence of hewn stone before or at the time of the 

 Roman conquest. But these monuments could not have been so 

 late as the Saxon conquest, for the chroniclers would have described 

 their erection, whereas they were silent. Inigo Jones' hypothesis 

 that Stonehenge was a Roman work had been received with ridicule, 

 and he was probably wrong in attributing it to such a polished and 

 cultured people as the Romans, but he might have been correct had 

 he regarded it as a last expiring effort of the partially-civilized 

 heathen devotees of the ancient religion to assert their faith. As 

 to /iow the stones were wrought, it had been surmised that flint 

 implements were used, but it was quite imj)ossible that such hard 

 sandstones could have been cut with flints. Bronze tools may have 

 been employed, for it is almost certain that the magnificent works 

 of the Egyptians were executed with bronze implements. Even the 

 Romans had scarcely adopted the use of iron before the first Punic 

 War. The hewn circles were constructed with what are called sarseu 

 stones, that is, stones not quarried but found in superficial deposits. 

 The facts as they stand would certainly lead to the inference that the 

 hewn and unhewn circles are of different periods, the latter entirely 

 pre-historic, the former of the early Romano-British period. 



Mr. CuNNiNGTON replied, stating that, elaborate as the calculations 

 quoted by Professor Jones might be, between the altar- stone and 

 the Friar's Heel was a recumbent block now known as the 

 " Slaughtering Stone/' but which, as his grandfather had proved. 



