By William Gowland, FSA, FIC. 31 
_ must often be filled with water in winter, and its alternate freezing 
and thawing could not have failed to have caused a very much 
greater amount of disintegration than their sides now present, had 
they been cut by the builders of Stonehenge. 
Moreover, that the monoliths were not shaped by cutting holes 
along the line of desired fracture is, I think, satisfactorily proved 
_ by the large blocks of sarsen which were found in the excavations. 
These, it is not unreasonable to assume, had been detached from 
some of the monoliths in the process of shaping them, yet on none 
are there any traces of such holes. All, without exception, had 
simply rudely fractured surfaces. 
This rough shaping of the sarsens doubtless generally took place 
at the spots where they were found; the final dressing only being 
performed in the immediate neighbourhood of the sites where they 
were to be set up. 
_ To remove the inequalities resulting from this treatment, to 
‘reduce the stones to a proper thickness, and to give to their faces 
he slightly curved surfaces’ which many of the monoliths present, 
evidently required more tedious operations. 
The mode in which these ends were attained is clearly evident 
On examining the surfaces of some of the stones, notably Nos. 59, 
54, and the underside of 55a. On these will be seen several broad 
parallel and shallow grooves having a more or less prominent rib 
between them. This is well seen on the fallen stone. 
_ These grooves were undoubtedly made with the stone mauls by 
violently pounding the stone with them in a line running longi- 
tudinally over the surface to be levelled or removed. 
a action of a maul so used on the sarsen rock of which the 
stones consist was this: each blow fractured and disintegrated the 
surface over a considerable area and to a considerable depth, forming 
a shallow cavity, varying in size with the hardness of the rock and 
he violence of the blow. The procedure was as follows :—one or 













‘Tt may be mentioned incidentally that the same curved surfaces are found 
n the internal faces of the huge megalithic blocks of which the dolmens in 
apan are constructed whenever these are of hewn stone. See Archeologia, 
