Rude Stone Antiquities of Brittany. By Miss Russell. 509 



close together for anybody to walk between them ; which is 

 rather suggestive of a barrier or rampart to be filled up with 

 brushwood. 



Stonehenge is not far from the old capital of Winchester, and 

 seems to me to have been very much what tolerably civilized 

 barbarians, not savages, might have constructed from verbal 

 descriptions, or very rude drawings of Greek and Roman circular 

 buildings. Mortar is the great discovery, as Captain Conder 

 points out ; and Stonehenge must be older than the Roman 

 occupation of Britain. 



To return to the dolmens of Brittany. Some of the people 

 believe the great covering-stones to be concrete, they are so large, 

 and the grain of the limestone so coarse. One such is said to be 

 27 feet long, but I think that includes a piece broken off. I 

 regret not having taken an inside measure of the largest dolmen, 

 the Dol ar Marchand, or Merchant's Table, and an outside one 

 of the great roof slab of the dolmen in the mound called Mane 

 Lud, which is flush with the surface. The three specimens 

 referred to are all near Locmariaker. Mane Lud means in 

 Breton, Hill of Ashes; bat as it is really of dirty white chalk, 

 the name is probably best explained by the Welsh llwyd or lud, 

 which still means "gi*ey." Mane is a good example of the 

 primitive sound ; for that something like it is the sound which 

 comes most readily, seems the only reason why it should have so 

 many important meanings in widely separated languages. That 

 man, mind, maintain, in many languages hand, mansion, mains 

 or manas (home-farm in Scotland), and innumerable other words, 

 should all be derived from, or even connected with, a Sanscrit 

 ma, to measure, as has been suggested, seems unlikely. 



In three cases at least we saw groups of three dolmens ; at 

 Roche Guyon, near Plouharnel, the largest has a line of thirteen 

 small holes across the top of the large roof- stone ; while of one 

 of the others only the entrance passage remains ; and this is an 

 instructive case, for Mr Lukis mentions, in his little handbook to 

 the antiquities of Carnac (now out of print) that it had had a 

 beehive roof, which had disappeared when he wrote, showing 

 how much more readily small stones disappear than large ones ; 

 the others are comparatively entire. 



I saw the lines of rude holes in several other cases, on the 

 dolmens and on the stones at Erdeven. They are very much like 

 those common in Scotland, but are rather deeper and narrower 



