190 Druidism in connection with Wiltshire. 
“Such” says Abbé Banier, “were the sciences and doctrines which 
the Druids endeavoured to inculcate upon their candidates whose 
of term probation was very long.! When any of those candidates had 
amore happy genius for speculative sciences than their companions, 
the masters sent them into Great Briraty, for their improvement 
and further advances, for the Druids of that Island were accounted the 
most accomplished of all; whether it was that their being less taken 
up than the Gauls, gave them more time to study, or for the reason 
we have given above. Notwithstanding this distinction, they 
maintained regular correspondence together, and consulted one 
another upon all important emergences. 
“Besides the study of religion and philosophy, the Druids also 
applied themselves to medicine; but they owed all their reputation 
in this to the notion people had of their knowing perfectly the 
influence of the stars, and that they had insight into futurity: for 
as everything in man has a mixture of good and evil, so those sages 
who were so much reverenced, addicted themselves to astrology, 
divination, and magic; sciences so much to the taste of the people, 
Scriptural emblem of the resurrection represented by a key or keys, as also 
the badges of the heathen deities Mercury, the conductor of departed spirits 
to the regions of the dead, and Pluto the inexorable monarch of these 
‘supposed dreary realms, there is room at least for conjecture that a key interred 
in a Druidical sepulchre may intimate an expectation of a future resurrection. 
The Parish clerk at Abury, Mr. Lawrence Chivers, when digging a grave 
some years since in seemingly unopened ground in the Church-yard, at the east 
end of the Church, discovered an ancient key covered with rust, about five feet 
deep, lying with a ‘‘frame of bones,” which almost immediately crumbled into 
dust when exposed to the air. The grave must have been very ancient, and 
there was no mound to distinguish nor any stone to mark it. About fifty 
years since Mr. Chivers found a nearly similar key, very ancient and rusty, in 
another unmarked and undistinguished grave a little to the south of the South 
Porch of the Church: no clue could be obtained to this key, which is now lost. 
1“ As the Druids wrote nothing, and all their knowledge was digested into 
verse, they obliged their novices (like Pythagoras) to learn them by heart, and 
these verses were so numerous, that sometimes fifteen or twenty years were 
necessary to learn them. Julius Cesar, who relates this fact, gives two reasons 
for it: the first is, that the doctorines of the Druids might not be known to any, 
and that it might appear the more mysterious; the second is, that the young 
people who were obliged to learn these verses, might be the more careful to im- 
prove their memory.”—Banier’s Myth. vol. iii. p. 236. 
et et ey 
