608 EXCAVATIONS IN AN ANCIENT 



has been suggested, was the case with a millstone found split to 

 pieces in a Saxon grave discovered ^ at Winster in Derbyshire, and 

 showing, which this grave did not, signs of a fire having been 

 lighted in it. But one of the many valuable hints which I owe to 

 Professor Phillips has made me think that it may be to frost 

 rather than to fire that we ought to look to account for the fractures 

 of volcanic products such as these. A porous soil would allow the 

 cavities of such a piece of lava to become filled with water, and a 

 shallow grave in a severe winter might furnish the other requisite 

 conditions. Some mortar-like matter was adherent to the exterior 

 of the piece of lava besides and distinct from the calcareous in- 

 crustation which the water of the soil had deposited upon it. The 

 lava itself, as containing hauyne^ we may be justified in regarding 

 as having, in all probability, come from Niedermennig, which is a 

 place whence, in the time of Augustus 2, the Romans took building 

 materials for the bridge at Treves, and whence, as a matter of fact, 

 millstones are now largely exported, and whence, consequently, we 

 may think it not wholly unlikely^ they were exported in former 

 and Anglo-Saxon times. It is difficult, of course, to be quite sure 

 that a sub-globular mass such as the piece of lava I found at the 

 feet of this Anglo-Saxon female had been a piece of a quern ; but 

 fragments, of identical and closely identical mineralogical characters, 

 found ' near a barrow in Norfolk,' and ^ in a British barrow at 

 Thetford,' respectively, have been considered as pieces of a mill- 

 stone by the well-known antiquary J. Wickham Flower, Esq., to 

 whose kindness I owe the opportunity of comparing these several 

 sets of volcanic fragments together. 



Schaaff'hausen * has put on record several instances of Germanic 

 interments either in coffins made out of tufa^ or in graves with 

 fragments of such volcanic matter set round their copes, together 

 with other stones, and it is just possible that the Niedermennig 

 lava may have been put, as it was in this grave, at the foot of the 

 grave, whilst other stones were set round the sides, as a kind of 

 reminiscence of what the ^setting' of the interment might have 



^ Extract from the 'Times,* Thursday, Oct. 33, 1856, given in 'Horae Ferales,' 

 p. 104. 



^ Daubeny, on 'Volcanoes,' pp. 49, 64. 



' See Bruce, ' Eoman Wall,' ed. iii. 1867, p. 438, seen by me subsequently to 

 writing as above. 



* 'Op. cit.' pp. 122, 127; Wren, ' Parentalia,' p. 27. 



