356 Abury. 



spring, summer, and -mnter. The stone which Stukeley called the 

 'Ring' Stone and considered to be that to which the victim about 

 to be slain was fastened, Mr. Duke pronounces to have been a 

 gnomon ; and the name Abury to be a corruption of the word 

 "Abiri," (Cabiri) signifying in Hebrew "the niighty ones," in 

 allusion to the two temples as the representatives of the sun and the 

 moon, the two chief deities in the Saba^an or planetary worship.^ 



Mr. Herbert,- in his learned work, 'Cyclops Christianus' (1849), 

 expresses his belief that the Stonehenges, Aveburies, Carnacs, etc., 

 did not exist in Britain or Gaul when Caesar, Strabo, Diodorus, 

 Mela, Pliny, and Tacitus wrote, otherwise these writers would have 

 certainly made mention of them ; but that groves of upright stones 

 were substituted by the later Britons for the oak tree groves of 

 obsolete Druidism. He treats the "Dracontian" theory with great 

 scorn, and says, " When the case of Avebury is divested of lies and 

 forgeries, I see nothing in it but great circles and avenues, with 

 some reason for thinking that groves and woodland walks were 

 typified by them, none for supposing the form of a snake was ex- 

 pressed." He continues, " It would be no reasonable supposition, 

 that the same people should at one time have venerated their oaken 

 groves with that zeal and love, of which the name has become so 

 famous, and also have expended energies immensely great to repeat 

 and imitate in lifeless stone the living symbol of their system ; for 

 substitutes are seldom used concurrently with their prototypes. It 

 follows that they did so at a different time, and under altered cir- 

 cumstances, and, we should add, in altered localities. For their 

 solemn rites were then called out of the woods, in which their 

 wooden idols stood, in which their sacrifices were performed, and 



1 ' Druiflical Temples of Wilts,' pp. 59, 60, 188. See, on Mr. Duke's theory, 

 the Christian Remembrancer, vol. xii. 1846. One cannot but remark, how 

 much the disposition to theorize about Abury would have been checked, by the 

 publication of Aubrey's plans by Sir E. Hoare. 



^ The Honble. Algernon Herbert, who was a member of the noble house of 

 Carnai-vou, was born 1792, was placed in the 1st class in Lit. Hum. in the year 

 1813, became a Fellow of Merton College, and was called to the bar. He died 

 in June 1855. A short notice of him appeared in the Gentleman's Magazine for 

 December, 1855. 



