196 On Ringsbury and other Camps in North Wiltshire. 
-temple could witness to no higher effort at construction, it is not likely that any 
such was exhibited in their dwellings. A people who had not learnt to put one 
stone upon another, and who had not yet used tools to dress stones (if they had 
them), must have resorted to other contrivances for that shelter from the weather 
which the human frame requires. Where rocks presented the means, caves 
would be hollowed out, or where natural action had already hollowed out the 
cave, we have witness that men used them. But where no rocks were to be 
fonnd, as on our Wiltshire downs, the only other resource at the hands of such 
unskilled men was to imitate the wild animal in his instinct, and burrow their 
homes in the earth. That such was the case we know from the ancient British 
earth-dwellings that have been discovered on the downs and elsewhere. 
Then, in that far distant age, for which the accepted chronology finds no place, 
when mankind were in the first rudiments of existence, their temples were stones 
raised on end in circular order, and their dwellings were caves or earth-burrows. 
And that these vestiges of that far distant age are not local or descriptive of 
the condition of mankind in one or two spots on the earth, is evident from the 
fact which is gathering strength year by year, that these primitive temples like 
Abury are scattered over the face of the earth, witnessing one common religion 
for its inhabitants, and witnessing, at the same time, what is more to my point 
that the range of civilization was the same everywhere, and rude unskilled man, 
whilst rearing such temples to his god, could but “ hide himself in holes in the 
earth.” 
The universality of this worship, which tradition, and its most natural 
probability, would seem to say was that of the sun, has its witness in circular 
megalithic temples in every quarter of the world. The instances, which I have 
been able to collect, of such temples prove that the religion, whatever it was, 
was once the religion of India, China, Southern Europe, Arabia, North Africa; 
and a friend of mine, whilst shooting the ‘‘ Ovis Ammon ” in the wilds of Thibet 
came upou a “Druid Temple,” as he called it, in perfect circle in the bottom of 
a valley remote from all intercourse with the rest of the world. And these 
instances are multiplying continually of the existence of these primitive temples 
in many unexpected quarters, witnessing, as I have said, not only to a common 
worship, but to a strange Zevel of existence of the human race throughout the 
world at the time they were building. 
Of course this fact, which is assuming a commanding strength of proof, can 
find no room for itself in the limited chronology that is generally accepted. But, 
if we enlarge the time of man’s existence since the Deluge by several thousand 
years, we can imagine a state of things in which it would be possible for the 
human race to have remained long undeveloped—in one sameness of existence, 
with habits of life but little varied, and with one common worship symbolized by 
the common temple, found almost everywhere. 
If so, then it seems impossible to assign so recent a date as even the most 
remote that is given in the many histories of Abury for the building of its temple. 
And the original builders must be placed far back in the distant ages, when 
mankind were dwellers in caves and earth-burrows, and when the same hands 
that dug the foss and reared the mound round Abury, dug the foss and raised the 
mounds of Barbury, Ringsbury, and the rest. 
It is from these considerations that I draw the conclusion that those many 
