30 PAPERS, ETC. 
in others of peaceable interment— without longing to know 
more about them than simply that they have lived and 
died and left their marks behind them. 
This natural wish to know the origin and history of the 
objects with which we are familiar, when unassisted by 
historical knowledge and accurate investigation, has given 
rise to many a strange opinion. I have heard the Devil, 
the Romans, the Danes, Merlin, Michael Scott, Robin 
Hood and Oliver Cromwell, all declared to have been the 
constructors not only of mysterious earthworks and monu- 
ments, “the work of men’s hands,” but, together with St. 
Hilda, St. Cuthbert, and some other saints, to have 
produced geological phenomena, which are certainly not 
the productions of human skill and labor, but of the 
more mysterious operations of Almighty power, through 
the agency of natural causes. Now it is clearly impossible 
to draw certain conclusions from uncertain premises, but it 
does not necessarily follow that because a thing is uncertain 
therefore it is absurd; and since our natural impulse will 
force us to conjecture, it will at all events be wise to make 
our conjectures as probable as we can: for on the degree 
of their probability will of course depend their value, and 
though it must be confessed that many of our data are 
mythical, yet it will be found that many of them are very 
probable, and some I will venture to say as nearly certain 
as the greater number of events of a like antiquity which 
are generally received as historial facts. 
I will then, without farther preface, proceed to lay before 
you a brief general sketch of what seems to me to be the 
probable history of those mysterious earthworks of which 
I have spoken, and will then go on more particularly to 
describe those at Castle Neroche, and to show the points 
of similarity and dissimilarity which these last present 
Lee u er Ei ir 
ka Du fa 
Bi. =: 
