STONEHENGE AND THE STARS 249 



similar kind. Even the much more magnificent 

 ruin of Avebury, which in Charles IPs time was 

 said by Aubrey to " as much exceed Stonehenge 

 as a cathedral doth a parish church," was made of 

 rough, unhewn stones and so has been looked upon 

 as an earlier edifice than its southern sister. 



Then, in the next place, the stones at Stone- 

 henge are of two kinds. The greater number and 

 the larger stones are the so-called " sarsens " of 

 the district, sandstone blocks which in certain 

 places, for example at Clatford Bottom, between 

 Marlborough and Avebury, may be seen as regular 

 rivers of stone. No doubt in early days, before 

 many of them had been used up for road-mending, 

 boundary stones and the like purposes, there must 

 have been many more of these great blocks in 

 existence over the surface of Salisbury Plain, so 

 that the builders of the temple had, in all prob- 

 ability, no very great distance to go in search of 

 the materials for their edifice. But in addition to 

 these great stones there is an interior horseshoe- 

 shaped arrangement of stones of a different 

 character. These " blue stones," as they have long 

 been called, are of a different nature from the 

 others, being mostly what is known as porphyritic 

 diabase, and, as there are no stones of this kind on 

 the plain, nor, indeed, within many miles of 

 Stonehenge, it was thought that they must have 

 been carried from a distance and that they were 

 perhaps the sacred stones of some distant tribe 

 who had brought them to the Plain when migrat- 

 ing there themselves ; had set them up as sacred 

 objects ; and, finally, had surrounded them with 



