54 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



hut circles. Many there are who hold that these circles were 

 places of burial and nothing more ; interments have been found 

 in some (just as they may be found in some churches), but not in 

 all of them, and the absence of interments in some shows that 

 burial was not, as a rule, their primary object. Others consider 

 the circles of standing stones to be merely the remains of the 

 circular walls of large stone towers, but that idea hardly requires 

 serious notice. On Dartmoor there are also numerous long rows 

 of small standing stones, which frequently have a small circle, 

 with or without a barrow inside it, at one end of the line, or it 

 may be a barrow without a circle. One of these lines is nearly 

 two miles long, and extends from one of the "sacred " circles to a 

 barrow, which was no doubt a tomb. Nothing really like these 

 stone rows is found anywhere but on Dartmoor, and what the 

 idea underlying their construction was is most uncertain. If, 

 when they were erected, the fogs on Dartmoor were as frequent 

 as they are now, the " rows " might have helped the inhabitants 

 to find their way about ; but there was most likely some more 

 cccult reason for their construction than that. About forty of 

 these rows are still left on different parts of Dartmoor. 



The ancient population of the moors, which was apparently 

 more numerous than that of the present day, must have left con- 

 siderable quantities of refuse in the shape of bones, which, if 

 they could be found, would enable zoologists to tell us what 

 animals and birds they reared, or hunted, and lived upon ; and 

 amongst the bone and shell-heaps might be found further frag- 

 ments of tools, weapons, and pottery, which would also add to 

 our information about their manners and customs, but their 

 " kitchen-middens " have yet to be discovered and reported 

 upon. 



The tombs of the hut-dwellers have for the most part been 

 broken into and their contents scattered long ago, so that we 

 know little about their physical characteristics. They are 

 generally supposed to have been a small dark-haired race, and 

 the size of some of their dwellings, and particularly the dimen- 

 sions of the entrances to them, seem to favour that view; but, 

 although we are not so well informed upon these points as we 

 could wish, the excavations recently made enable us to form a 

 fair idea of their manner of life. We can imagine the women 



