
1891.] Among the Prehistoric Monuments of Brittany. 875 
theory once held that the. dolmens were constructed by a migra- 
tory people, maintaining that they were the work of a sedentary 
population, and not of one and the same race, as skeletons of 
very different races have been found in them. At the same time 
many facts tend to show that the dolmen-builders in the first 
place came from the east. Mortillet also states that dolmens 
were burial chambers used as places of sepulture by families or 
by tribes. The menhirs were also quarried and erected by the 
designers and builders of the dolmens, who roughly hewed and 
chipped the monoliths into their present shapes with small axes 
of polished flint, jade, and the harder varieties of serpentine. 
Before we inquire into the traits and customs of the Neolithic 
tribes, let us glance at the monuments they left behind them. 
After breakfast we clambered into a Breton village cart, driven 
by a youthful latter-day Celt, with M. Gaillard as our courteous 
guide, and set out over an excellent road, often bordered with the 
broom and hedged with gorse, past farms and scattered dwellings 
of stone, through the village of Carnac, with distant views of the 
Atlantic, dotted with the brown sails of the sardine fishing boats, 
and on our left overlooked by the tumulus of San Michel, the 
highest elevation in the neighborhood. The road soon passes 
over a causeway bordered with salt vats; and after an hour’s 
drive we cross the ferry a little above the fishing village of La 
Trinité. The ferry, by the way, was an interesting study. 
Although the amount of travel on this road would hardly seem | 
to warrant it, the road on each side of the arm of the sea was 
elaborately paved with granite blocks to a point below low-water 
mark. The boat was a big scow, large enough to hold two 
carriages, and was slowly, laboriously pulled across by means of 
a large iron chain. 
At the village of Lockmariaquer, which was the site of Dari- 
origum, or of some other Roman settlement, we walk out to the 
end of the solid granite jetty, whose earliest foundations are 
attributed to the celts, the Romans afterwards improving upon 
them. We engage two fishermen to take us in their boats to 
Gaverne or Gavr’Inis, anglice Goat Island, on which is perhaps 
the most interesting tumulus and best-preserved sculptured dolmen 
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