OORNISII BOLMEXS. 97 



hundred, and in tlie department of Aveyron, little more than 

 double the size of Cornwall, the number is four hundred. This 

 proves that, while the dolmen builders lived in France a long 

 time, their stay in Cornwall was of an extremely brief duration. 

 Had their sojourn in Cornwall been lengthy they would have 

 spread all over the west of England, and every part of Cornwall 

 would have been covered with their monuments, but this is not the 

 case for even on Bodmin Moors, where a magnificent accumu- 

 lation of granite blocks is found, I do not know a single 

 standing dolmen. Such facts prove that the dolmen builders 

 only visited isolated districts in Cornwall, and remained there 

 but a short time. Indeed, I should be inclined to imagine that 

 they were colonies either from France or Ireland and, having 

 stayed a short time in our county, they returned to their original 

 home. This, also, is another proof that the builders of our 

 dolmens could not have been the Celts. We know, from 

 historical evidence, that the Celts must have l)een in Cornwall 

 before the Anglo-Saxon conquest of our county for, at least, 

 1,500 years, and for how much longer, we do not know. They 

 sjiread all over Cornwall and jienetrated to every part and, had 

 the dolmens been raised by them, they would have been as 

 numerous as the barrows and hut circles. ** 



And now we maj- ask by whom were they erected '? They 

 were not built by the Celts, and it is generally maintained that 

 the Celts introduced the use of bronze into Britain.'''^ It follows, 

 therefore, that our dolmens were erected during the Neolithic 

 period, a time when metals were unknown in Britain.-''' More- 

 over, they must have been built in the early part of the Neolithic 

 Age, for had they been raised at the end of that era the invading 



54. The fact that many dolmens must have been destroyed by the progress of 

 cultivation cannot be advanced as an argument against this conclusion, for there are 

 extensive moorlands in Cornwall on which the dolmens would still be standing in 

 numbers if the dolmen bvnlders ever penetrated to the districts. 



55. Early Man in Britain, by Professor Boyd Dawkins, pp. 34.^, 366. See also a 

 lecture delivered before the Royal Institution, by Dr. J. G. Garson, on " Early British 

 Races," and reported in Nature, Nov. 22nd, 1894. 



56. I am pleased to find that this conclusion is in harmony with that of Mr. R. 

 N. Worth, who assigns the dolmens to the Neolithic Age. Journal of the Royal 

 Institution of Cornwall, vol. xii., p. 94. Mr. Worth also says that the dolmen 

 builders spread along the north coast of Africa, and entered Britain long before the 

 Celts or the ^&^or\&— Journal of the Royal Institution of Cornwall, vol. xii., p. 203. 



