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powers of some Members. The return was made on foot or by 
rail, and the weather was favourable, 
This concluded the Excursions of the year, and if they were all 
“ old chestnuts” they were not the less interesting and instructive. 
The Field Club, which was founded in 1855, has now had 43 
years of life, and naturally excursions to novel or actually 
unvisited spots are difficult to find, so well has the Club investi- 
gated all the ruins, earthworks, country mansions and quarries 
of the country of which Bath is the centre. 
A very choice programme for afternoon meetings was issued at 
_ the fall of the year, the first paper on the rota, which is published 
in its entirety with plan of Stonehenge at page 1 of these 
Proceedings, being styled The Purpose, the Age, and the Builders 
of Stonehenge, December 8th, 1897. 
A well attended meeting of Members of the Field Club was 
held at the Royal Literary and Scientific Institution to receive 
from Mr. E. Story-Maskelyne, of Box, a novel and most interest- 
ing theory of the period of erection of this ancient and megalithic 
structure of Salisbury piain and its purpose. The reader of the 
paper, who is a grandson of the Astronomer-Royal, Mr. Neville 
Maskelyne 1765-1811, professed to have discovered from the 
positions of several conspicuous stars the exact date of the 
erection of these gigantic trilithons, and considers the original 
structure entirely of Sarsens to be a temple of the Sun erected 
by those bold navigators the Phcenicians, who traded for tin with 
the inhabitants of Britain, -some 2,843 years ago, i.e. B.C. 946. 
The whole structure with its outer circle and gigantic ellipse, the 
friar’s heel and slaughter-stone, and two outlying stones to the 
North and South and two mounds within the vallum, is an 
; ancient almanac, exhibiting in its East and West axis the rising 
of the sun at the summer solstice, the outlying stones and mounds 
_ viewed from certain positions in the inner trilithons pointing to 
certain so-called fixed stars which at that early period stood 
exactly on the lines connecting the stones and mounds, and 
