NEOLITHIC LIFE IN DEVON AND CORNWALL. 53 



raw material was brought from a part of Devonshire thirty miles 

 away, to be worked up at this place. Mr. Francis Brent, 

 F.S.A., of Plymouth, has collected much valuable information 

 about flint stations in Cornwall, but has unfortunately not yet 

 published it. 



On the slopes of Brown Willy and Rough Tor, which are the 

 highest points of Cornwall, there are numerous hut- circles and 

 enclosures which have not yet been explored ; some of these are 

 smaller than those of Dartmoor and Carnbre, and were covered 

 with roofs of stone and turf built up in the same way as the 

 walls ; one of them is still perfect, and at least one other has part 

 of the roof remaining. There also are five circles of standing 

 stones, the diameters of which, as I have pointed out elsewhere,* 

 seem to have been carefully measured, as indeed do the distances 

 between the circles themselves ; their positions also appear to 

 have been carefully selected, so as to bring them into certain 

 lines with the tops of the surrounding hills. All these things 

 point to an observance of the sun and stars for religious or 

 astronomical purposes, or both, and to some amount of commu- 

 nication, casual it may be rather than regular, with the East, 

 which we should hardly expect to find in conjunction with such 

 rude dwellings and appliances of living as the excavations 

 already described show to have belonged to the people by whom 

 the circles were almost certainly erected. But it must be borne 

 in mind that rough ways of living are by no means incompatible 

 with high intellectual capacity, and that the habitations of parts 

 of Ireland and Scotland in which many of our most useful public 

 men have first seen the light have not been very superior to those 

 of Carnbre or Dartmoor. Another reflection arising from this is 

 that the dwellings in Ireland and elsewhere which strike visitors 

 from England as being so extremely uncivilized, are not the 

 result of degradation of the inhabitants, but rather of their not 

 having advanced in that particular much beyond the fashions of 

 their ancestors of two or three thousand years ago. 



There are circles of standing stones on Dartmoor, some of 

 which seem to have been arranged in relation to some of the 

 surrounding hills, or to single stones standing near, and which 

 were almost certainly constructed by the people who lived in the 



* ' Journal of the Anthropological Institute,' August, 1895. 



