1 32 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



not been excavated. Its covering stone, however, is larger, or was before 

 one end was broken off. Judging from the size of a man in a picture 

 which I bought it was forty feet in length, eight in breadth and two 

 or three in thickness. 



Some of the other dolmens in the vicinity are nearly as large as 

 these, and some vary by having lateral chambers given off, either from 

 tbe main chamber or from the passage. None, however, are their 

 equals in the size of the roofing stones, but in most instances the roof 

 is formed of several stones. I recall measuring one roughly as it lay 

 across the dolmen at Locmariaquer — as between eleven and twelve" feet 

 in length. 



The rock of which these monuments are formed is the common 

 granite of the region. The blocks were probably weathered out from 

 the underlying bed rock by the elements and needed no quarrying on 

 the part of the unknown engineers. 



Speculations as to the time at which these monuments were erected, 

 the people who put them in position and the purposes for which they 

 were intended are numerous in the literature of the subject, some of 

 them as fantastic and absurd as those which ascribe the antiquities of 



Fig. 7. Dolmen of Mane Retual, Locmariaquer, foreshortened so as to include 



all of the roofing stones. 



Yucatan to the followers of St. Thomas of apostolic times. Usually 

 they are attributed to that mysterious people, the " Druids," whoever 

 they may have been. Certain it is that they long antedated the con- 

 quest of Gaul by the Eomans, while the relics found in connection with 

 some of them would seem to indicate that they may date back to the 

 second stone age, the neolithic period of the archeologist. 



