128 PROCEEDINGS COTTESWOLD CLUB 1905 
Later enquiries, I need hardly remind you, have not 
supported Fergusson’s views. The excavations conducted 
by Professor Gowland at Stonehenge show that the worked 
trilithons were made in neolithic times, and a date as high 
as seventeen centuries before our era has been assigned to 
them.’ The safest conclusion seems to be that Stone- 
henge dates from about 2000 to 1800 B.C. 
Now it is quite impossible to attribute to all the monu- 
ments in rude stone of Southern India anything like 
such a high antiquity as this. Here the special difficulty 
is that while in Europe, for instance in England, the series 
of these monuments was definitely closed about the time 
of the Roman occupation, their construction in India has 
been continuous to the present time. In other words, in 
India there has been no break between the archaic and the 
modern culture. ‘‘ Had it not been first the Roman, and 
then the Celt, by sword and cord set vigorously to improve 
the older races,” writes Fergusson, “ we might now have 
human sacrifices celebrated on the plains of Beauce, in the 
neighbourhood of Chartres, and find people quietly erect- 
ing dolmens in the valley of Dordogne.”’ 
In India it was very different. The Aryans seem to 
have made no effort to occupy the Deccan plateau, though 
they may have sent missionaries to convert the tribes. 
Even in later times, when the Mohammedans overthrew 
the native dynasties, their control over South India re- 
mained imperfect. The kingdoms which they established 
in the Deccan were dependent on the goodwill ‘of their 
Hindu subjects, and the rulers never interfered with the 
traditional rites and customs of their people. With the 
wild tribes of Assam the Mohammedans never cared to 
interfere, and it was not till our own day that they were 
reduced to order. 
1 “Man,” 1902, pp. 6-10; Windle, Of. cit., 185 ff. 
2 Op. cit., p. 460. 
