LONG BARROWS. 483 



Fully admitting that the resemblance can scarcely be due to a mere 

 accident, or to an instinctive power by which human minds and 

 hands, with a common purpose and the same appliances and similar 

 conditions of life, produce results almost the same, I should incline 

 to regard the like features in the barrows in question as the result 

 of a wide-spread and continued intercourse between different peoples 

 living under somewhat the same state of cultivation. Passing by the 

 Hunebedden (giants' graves) abundant in the Province of Drenthe 

 in Holland, which seem to belong to the same class of sepulchral 

 places as the chambered barrows of Denmark, but of the original 

 contents of which not much is known in consequence of their 

 having been for long past open and subject to being rifled, we 

 arrive at a very large number of chambered barrows, both of the 

 long and round form, in the west of France, including the Channel 

 Islands, which are spread from Brittany to the Gulf of Lyons. 

 All the evidence we possess, which amounts to a large aggregate of 

 facts derived from an examination of these mounds, shows very con- 

 clusively that they are the burial-places of people unacquaint d 

 with metal ; for though abundance of stone implements have been 

 found in some of the chambers, no article of bronze, much less of 

 iron, has been discovered. But when the skulls are taken into 

 consideration, it becomes apparent that, unlike the long barrows of 

 Britain, they are the burial-places of more than one race. Both 

 brachy-cej)halic and dolicho-cephalic heads have been met with in 

 apparently undisturbed chambers, nor can it be said that one type 

 is much more abundant than the other. This fact again seems to 

 point to intercourse and admixture, ratber than identity of race, as 

 being the source of the same mode of interment. It is not necessary 

 to make any remarks on the apparently similar sepulchral mounds 

 and chambers of Spain and Portugal, nor indeed have we the 

 information which would enable us to come to any certain conclu- 

 sion in regard to them. It may suffice again to draw attention to 

 the fact that throughout a large area on the west of Europe there 

 exist numerous burial-places under mounds both of a long and of a 

 round form, which, when the receptacle for enclosing the body or 

 bodies is made of stone, is constituted by a chamber and not by a 

 cist, and that nothing whatever of metal except gold has ever been 

 discovered in them. 



I 1 2 



