RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 453 



society and the more immature periods of life, between the 

 savage and the child ; and the huge circle of Stennis seems 

 suggestive of one of these. It is considerably more than four 

 hundred feet in diameter ; and the stones which compose it, 

 varying from three to fourteen feet in height, must have been 

 originally from thirty-five to forty in number, though only 

 sixteen now remain erect. A mound and fosse, still distinct- 

 ly traceable, run round the whole ; and there are several mys- 

 terious-looking tumuli outside, bulky enough to remind one 

 of the lesser morains of the geologist. But the circle, notwith- 

 standing its imposing magnitude, is but a huge child's house 

 after all, one of those circles of stones which children lay 

 down on their village-green, and then, in the exercise of that 

 imaginative faculty which distinguishes between the young 

 of the human animal and those of every other creature, con- 

 vert, by a sort of conventionalism, into a church or dwelling- 

 house, within which they seat themselves, and enact their 

 imitations of the employments of their seniors, whether do- 

 mestic or ecclesiasticaL The circle of Stennis was a circle, 

 say the antiquaries, dedicated to the sun. The group of 

 stones on the southern promontory of the lake formed but a 

 half-circle, and it was a half-circle dedicated to the moon. To 

 the circular sun the great rude children of an immature age 

 of the world had laid down a circle of stones on the one pro- 

 montory to the moon, in her half-orbed state, they had laid 

 down a half-circle on the other; and in propitiating these 

 material deities, to whose standing in the old Scandinavian 

 worship the names of our Sunday and Monday still testify, 

 they employed in their respective inclosures. in the exercise 

 of a wild unregulated fancy, uncouth irrational rites, the ex- 

 tremeness of whose folly was in some measure concealed by 

 the horrid exquisiteness of their cruelty. We are still in 

 the nonage of the species, and see human society sowing its 

 wild oats in a thousand various ways, very absurdly often, 



