By William Long, Esq. 101 



and to attend to the mode after which that sect principally repre- 

 sented their favorite deity." He quotes from Pliny (Nat. Hist, 

 lib. XXX. cap. i.,) the following- : " Britannia hodie earn (Magiam) 

 attonite celebrat tantis ceremoniis,ut cum Persis dedisse videri possit.^' 

 " The famous circular stone monuments of the Druids so numerous in 

 Britain, were, doubtless, intended to be descriptive of astronomical 

 cycles, by a race, who, not having*, or politically forbidding-, the use 

 of letters, had no other permanent method of instructing their dis- 

 ciples, or handing down their knowledge to posterity. For the most 

 part the stone pillars which compose them are found to be twelve m. 

 number, alluding to the twelve months ; and many to consist of thirty, 

 in reference to the number of years, which, according to the Druids, 

 formed an age or generation, and was one of their favorite cycles, or 

 else to that of the days of which the ancient lunar month consisted." 

 Mr. Fergusson, in the " Quarterly Review," No. 215, gives the 

 following as the summary of his argument for the Buddhist origin 

 of Stonehenge ; " There are few chapters in the history of the world 

 at present so dark as that which treats of the doings of the Celtic 

 races of Britain before the advent of the Saxons, and none to which 

 the new science of ethnography is likely to be of more value. All 

 however which concerns us at present is to know that Buddhism, in 

 some shape or other, and under some name that may be lost, did 

 exist in Britain before the conversion of its inhabitants to Christianity. 

 If this has been made clear, a great step has been gained in the 

 elucidation of the antiquities of this illiterate people. If we may 

 venture to turn the lamp of Indian Buddhism on these hitherto 

 mysterious monuments, we see at once what was meant by the inner 

 choir at Stonehenge by comparing it with Sanchee and elsewhere. 

 We are no longer puzzled by the small granite monoliths, standing 

 unsymmetrically between the two original groups, and inside the 

 principal, for we can at once assume them to be the danams of suc- 

 ceeding votaries, offered after the temple was finished ; and we can 

 easily see how it came to be a cenotaph, or memorial church, dedi- 

 cated to those who died and were buried at Amesbury. 

 There is, in fact, no winding in the labyrinth through which this 

 thread might not conduct us in safety, and nothing so mysterious 



