
y 
884 The American Naturalist. [October, 
the median stone of the cromlech and with the sun. It is there- 
fore inferred, and very naturally, that the designers and builders 
planted these stones in accordance with a fixed plan, and that the 
inclosure must have been the scene of some ceremony at the time 
of the summer solstice. And this confirms the idea insisted on 
‘by archeologists, among them MM. Cartailhac and Gaillard, that 
the groups of standing pillars were planted after a common design 
and nearly at the same epoch, and that the people who erected 
them were possibly worshipers of the sun, having brought with 
them from the far east, their original home, the cult so char- 
acteristic of eastern races. On the morning of our last day spent 
in the Morbihan—and what soul-stirring and awe-inspiring days- 
they were, with the charm of the fresh Atlantic breezes, and 
the bright sun lighting up the heaths and plains, the quaint cos- 
tumes and dialect of the peasants lending an unusual human 
interest to the scene—we drove to the dolmens and alignments of 
Erdeven, through a region of lilliputian farms. The property of 
the country people is chiefly in land, and the farms handed down 
from one generation to another becoming gradually halved and 
_ quartered, though many were triangular or polygonal in shape, 
until some of them seem scarcely large enough to support a sheep 
or cow, or to afford room enough for even a small potato patch. 
‘Moreover, they are hedged in by high turf walls overgrown with 
gorse, one of the most forbidding of prickly plants. Some of the 
farms were inclosed in turf fences, perhaps four or five feet high, 
with the corners elaborately built of stone. 
The largest of the dolmens in Brittany is that of Crucuno, 
called La Roche aux Fées, or the Stone of the Fairies. A farmer 
had built his house next to it, and the dolmen, by no means of 
fairy-like proportions, was used as a cow-house until its purchase 
and restoration by the government. It is twenty-four feet long 
by twelve wide, and one can stand upright in it. From this im- 
pressive dolmen a path, which a boy will point out for a slight 
cupreous gratification, leads across the fields to the very remarka- 
ble dolmen of Mané-Groh, which is galleried, and besides the 
principal chamber, has four lateral inclosures. 




