Wiltshire Downs in a Hundred Square Miles round Abury. 61 
barrows are but few in number and insignificant in value, which 
seems to indicate a very high antiquity. The district illustrated in 
Mr. Smith’s work affords several examples of Karly British camps : 
the difficult problem as to how these camps were supplied with 
water receives much illustration from details given of the con- 
struction of dew-ponds. The downs, as distinguished from the 
valleys, were the natural position for the dwellings of the early 
tribes, and this tract of country so fully investigated yields many 
examples of pit-dwellings. The famous Wansdyke, too, gives a 
characteristic sample of those stupendous earthworks, which must 
have been made at the eost of almost incalculable labour. LEarth- 
works of another class which Mr. Smith considers to be eattle-pens 
are numerous, as are the terraces or lynchets on the sides of the 
hills. The sarsen stones, of which the stone-works of the Early 
Britons in North Wilts are constructed, exist in countless thousands 
in this district, and their positions are indicated on the map. Their 
geological characteristics are easily summed up as “ masses of sand 
concreted together by a silicious cement, left scattered over the 
ground when the lower portions of the stratum were washed away,” 
but the question as to how such vast masses as form the trilithons 
of Stonehenge were moved and set up is not so quickly answered. 
Mr. Smith does not think it necessary to attribute to the Early 
British masons any extraordinary mechanical knowledge, remembering 
how much can be effected by sheer force of numbers, aided by such 
simple mechanical contrivanees as the roller, the lever, and the wedge. 
It is somewhat remarkable that North Wilts possesses very few 
relics of the Romans. The only tangible evidences of undoubted 
_ Roman work within the area treated of are the fragments of two 
Roman roads. 
No one is more competent to write of the early inhabitants of 
_ this island than Mr, Smith, and as, in the district he is dealing with, 
almost all classes of primeval remains are represented, we have in 
_ this volume a complete and most valuable digest of all that is known 
on the subject. He calls it a very matter-of-fact volume, and so 
indeed it is; but the facts are marshalled with such admirable 
clearness, and every statement and quotation verified by full and 
