VOL. XXVI.] PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. 515 



ancient authors now remaining do not mention it. This is only a negative 

 argument, and what we ought not to lay a very great stress on. The urns 

 seem clearly to evince that they were here. I know indeed that it is said that 

 these urns must be perfectly Danish, because of the small black bones and 

 ashes found in them ; which however is no sure ground to go upon. For I 

 have seen in the Bodleian repository, a piece of a Roman urn, which was dug 

 up several years ago at an old Roman town in England, with many others, 

 some of which were of different figures. And with it were small black bones, 

 ashes, &c. wrapped up in two pieces of coarse linen, of the same figure with 

 the urn. The smallness of the bones shows that they are the relics of children. 

 It was customary among the Romans, after the bodies were burnt, to wash the 

 bones with wine and milk, and afterwards the women wrapt their children in 

 linen, dried them in their bosoms, and put them into urns to be buried. This 

 custom was also peculiar to the Danes, who learned it from the Romans, from 

 whom also they received urn-burial itself. Such urns are also mentioned by 

 Sir Thomas Brown to have been found at Old Walsingham in Yorkshire. Nor 

 is the Roman history altogether silent as to the Isle of Man being known to the 

 Romans ; for Plutarch expressly tells us, that one Demetrius sailed thither, as 

 well as to other British isles, in the reign of Adrian. It is not surprising that 

 Runic incriptions are discovered in the places where Roman urns are found : 

 those inscriptions might have been made on other occasions, after it became 

 inhabited by Danes and Norwegians. The same thing has sometimes happened 

 in England : and Cambden particularly relates, in the close of his discourse 

 concerning Stone-Henge, that in the time of King Henry the 8th, there was 

 found at Stone-Henge a table of mixed metal, on which were engraved many 

 letters, but the character was so strange, that neither Sir Thomas Eliot, nor 

 Mr. Lilly, the famous schoolmaster of St. Paul's, could tell what to make of 

 them ; so no care was taken to preservexthe monument, the loss of which was 

 afterwards much lamented by Olaus Wormius, who took it to be Runic, as it 

 doubtless was: and yet Stone-Henge itself is a Roman work, as has been made 

 out by Mr. Inigo Jones, who, though he was answered by the learned Dr. 

 Charleton, yet Mr. Jones's opinion was very well defended by Mr. John Webb, 

 who has in his book distinctly examined the methods used both by the Romans 

 and Danes in their buildings. 



Having shown that these instruments were not military arms, either of the 

 Britons, Saxons, or Danes, I shall now endeavour to prove that they were 

 Roman. I once took them for a kind of axes, used by the Romans in their 

 sacrifices, of which Dr. Plot notices two sorts, the secures lapideae, and the 



3 u 2 



