120 Stonehenge and its Barrows. 



of Devonshire bordering on the Tamar and the Tavj, obseWing that 

 in India, on the tops of some of the pagodas, there are amazing 

 masses of rock, adds, that to place them in such elevated situations 

 they had recourse to aggeration. They took the laborious method 

 by accumulated earth of forming an easy ascent or inclined plane to 

 the top, by means of levers rolled them to the summit, and then re- 

 moved the mound (Bray, vol. i., p. 228)." * 



Mr. Tom Smith, sometime master, successively, of the Craven and 

 Hambledon packs of homids, a good artist and a clever man, had a 

 theory about the manner in which the stones were set up, which is 

 worth giving in the words of his biographer : ^ " Being shortly after 

 on a visit to the Bishop [Denison, his brother-in-law], a party was 

 made up to go to Stonehenge. On their return there was a discussion 

 on that wonderful structure, in which Mr. Smith did not take part. 

 This caused the Bishop to ask if he did not agree with the rest as to 

 the almost superhuman character of the pile, and the inadequacy of 

 any known means for raising it : he replied that he saw nothing so 

 marvellous about it, and that he thought he could point out a way 

 in which it might have been constructed. Pen, ink, and paper were 

 forthwith placed before him, and he was desired to put his ideas in 

 a tangible shape. He at once made a sketch, and the matter fur- 

 nished conversation for the evening. The Bishop, looking at the 

 sketch, allowed that there might be something in the supposition, 

 and next asked where the huge stones of Stonehenge could have 

 come from. Mr. Smith then gave an account of a fox having been 

 run to earth at the Grey Wethers, and explained that these stones 

 are just of the same character ; some of them being twenty feet 

 long, seven or eight wide, and three or four thick. He allowed that 

 it would require a great number of men to transport such stones for 

 ten miles over Salisbuiy Plain : but anyone who looks at the Wans- 

 dyke, which traverses the same district for thirty or forty miles, will 



* One would like to know how the roof of the Mausoleum of Theodoric, at 

 Ravenna, which is formed from a single block of limestone, 36 feet in its 

 internal diameter, and estimated to weigh above 200 tons, was raised to its 

 place. 



2 " Sporting Incidents in the Life of another Tom Smith," 1867. 



