876 The American Naturalist. [October, 
in the Morbihan, and probably in Europe. With a fair westerly 
wind and a bright sky we hie on, taking the opportunity to eat 
our lunch of cold meat, bread, and cider, with a course of excellent, 
though tiny, raw oysters, which are usually offered at the hotels 
throughout the coast towns of Brittany. Clambering ashore 
over the slippery rocks we walk up a lane bordered with fig trees, 
and ascend the eastern side of the mound, which is a galgal, or 
cairn, twenty-six feet high, and covered with soil overgrown with 
the broom and prickly gorse. 
The view from the summit of the mound, over the Gulf of 
Morbihan and its shores, is one of much interest, from the fact 
that some of the distant eminences are artificial mounds, and that 
on some of the islands there are dolmens. We can look across 
a narrow passage swept by swift tidal currents to the little ragged 
island of Er-Lanec, with the remnants of one cromlech, half of 
the circle on the shore and the other half below high-water mark, 
while beyond, at low water, can be seen the prostrate stones which 
once formed a second cromlech. The land has fallen, and the 
sea has partly torn down this and all the other islands since the 
times when the dolmen builders inhabited this region. 
Descending, we enter the gallery of the dolmen by a path 
walled in with the square porphyritic granite blocks taken from 
the sides of the galgal, and, passing through the low, narrow 
gallery about twenty-five feet long (Cartailhac says thirteen meters) 
we enter the chamber, which runs east and west. About forty 
huge slabs form the pavement, the walls, and the ceiling. One 
of the slabs in the ceiling is of quartz; and we judged the largest 
slab to be about eighteen feet square. But the distinguishing 
feature of this dolmen is the mysterious sculpturing on the slabs. 
All the granite wall-slabs are thus sculptured, the marks being 
cut in. And what was the nature of the tools? The quartz 
slabs alone had been untouched. Cartailhac argues, with good 
reason, we think, that the implements could not have been of iron, 
as only the softer granite was grooved and engraved, and that the 
engravings were made with stone tools. It is also noticeable 
that in other dolmens we visited, symbolic stone axes, mounted 
wu handles, are engraved on the slabs of the ceiling, while on a 





