By Professor T, Rupert Jones, F.R.S., F.G.8., Fe. 127 
hardened into a brown crust by this oxide. Fossils are extremely 
rare in them, excepting some remains of plants, to be alluded to by 
and by. 
Certain differences in constitution on the large scale, though the 
majority are uniformly solid throughout, have caused some Sarsens 
to have a lumpy structure, showing roundish portions throughout 
the mass, especially when much weather-worn, just as if the material 
had concreted at and around points at irregular distances apart, and 
with varying results from unequal power of aggregation: hence 
concretionary structure, with large or small irregular sandy kernels 
of greater or less hardness and persistency. 
Oceasionally a laminated structure is met with, visible only on 
the weather-worn faces of some blocks. 
Lastly, the numerous superficial hollows and internal cavities may 
be taken as belonging to structure, because they have been eaten 
out, or worn bigger and deeper, by the natural agencies brought 
to bear by wind and water on the soft parts of the stones, such 
as soft lumps and lines in the mass, that is, spots and streaks of 
weak material. 
IV.—Onriein or THE Name “ SarsEn.” 
These “ Greywethers,” “‘ Druidstones,” “ Sarsdens,”! “ Sarsens,” 
or “ Sassen,”’ have received the last names, as the Rev. John Adams 
has suggested (Transact. Newbury District Field-Club, vol. i., 1871, 
p. 117, and Geolog. Mag., vol. x., p. 199), probably from the Saxon 
Sar (Engl. grievous, troublesome ; Scotch, sair), and Stan (a stone) ; 
for they must have been sore hindrances ® to the early clearers of the 
land,—as, indeed, not unfrequently they are now. 
1There is a village, Sarsden, in Oxfordshire, three and three-quarter miles 
from Chipping-Norton ; and Sarson is a tything of Andover in Hampshire. Mr. 
Swayne reminds me that Aubrey suggests that Sarsden, in Hampshire, had or 
may have had something to do with Sarsens. Canon Jackson and the late 
Poulett Scrope, he tells me, went there to see if there were any vestige of them, 
‘and found none. Sarsden (or Sarson) is in Amport parish, near Andover, and 
lies on the Chalk. 
2 When you spoke of the ‘sore stones’ [in a lecture at Newbury, in 1880] I 
thought of the struggle I had had with the boulders during some twenty months 
of railway-construction in Sweden.” Letter to T. R. J., from Mr. Henry Fidler, 
December 4th, 1880. 
