By William Long, Esq. 99 



with which they had been associated had led to its construction. 

 Not to press, however, too far, the absence of written records, we 

 may fairly say, that even if their political position had been favourable 

 to such undertakings, the Saxons would hardly have built a stone 

 temple in the centre of a British necropolis; and that if they had done 

 so,it would have been, to a certain extent, surrounded by Saxon graves, 

 as well as by British ; but no traces of Saxon interment are here to 

 be found. It has been urged, too, that they would never have called 

 it by the ignominious name of " Stone Gallows," if they had them- 

 selves erected it.' 



Of the Danes, as the architects of Stonehenge, it will be enough 

 to say, with Warton,' that, " during their temporary visits and un- 

 matured establishment, Ihey had not leisure or opportunities for such 

 laborious and lasting structures, however suitable to their rude 

 conceptions," or, with Mr. Herbert, that " the advocates of the 

 Danes, as the builders of Stonehenge, ascribe to a transitory irruption 

 the performance of some settled government.^'' ^ 



And here it may be as well to notice the opinions of those, who 

 having made Indian Antiquities their study,* have come to the 



* Stukeley, p. 7, reprint. 

 ^ History of Kiddington, p. 70. 

 s'Cycl. Chr., p. 2. 

 * Mr. Max Miiller, writing about the great resemblance of Indian cromlechs, 

 cairns and kistaevDS, to those of Cornwall, Ireland, and Scotland, and the 

 frequency with which Indian officers speak of them as if they were Celtic or 

 Druidieal, says: — " All these monuments in the South of India are no doubt 

 extremely interesting, but to call them Celtic, Druidieal, or Sythic, is unscien- 

 tific, or, at all events, exceedingly premature. There is in all architectural 

 monuments a natural or rational, and a conventional, or it may be, irrational 

 element. A striking agreement in purely conventional features may justify 

 the assumption that monuments so far distant from each other as the cromlechs 

 of Anglesea and the 'Mori-Munni' of Shorapoor owe their origin to the 

 same architects, or to the same races. But an agreement in purely natural 

 contrivances goes for nothing, or, at least, for very little. Now there is very 

 little that can be called conventional in a mere stone pillar, or in a cairn, that 

 is, an artificial heap of stones. Even the erection of a cromlech can hardly be 

 claimed as a separate style of architecture. Children, all over the world, if 

 building houses with cards, will build cromlechs; and people, all over the 

 world, if the neighbourhood supplies large slabs of stone, will put three stones 

 together to keep out the sun or wind, and put a fourth stone on the top to keep 

 out the rain. Before monuments like those described by Captain Meadows 



