
888 The American Naturalist. [October 
during Roman occupation, must have remained prostrate from 
fifteen hundred to nineteen hundred years; “ yet it had previously 
stood on end long enough a time for the top to become so 
weathered as to be plainly distinguishable from the bottom.” 
What, then, was the use of these remarkable monuments? No 
burials took place among them. The chiefs and their families 
were deposited at death in the dolmens. The question is still an 
open one, the best archeologists differing as to whether they were 
monuments to the dead, or whether they were temples. The 
common design pervading all the larger alignments, showing that 
they were erected at the same epoch, forbids one accepting the 
view that they were simply commemorative of different persons, 
that they were a kind of archive, each stone recalling a fact, a 
person, or a date. The remarkable care observed in burying the 
dead proves that these people were strongly religious. The care 
taken to put in the proper place the odd stone, and its relation in 
the summer solstice to the rising sun, indicate that the align- 
ments were erected for the worship, on stated occasions, of the 
sun. M. Gaillard told us that he believed the menhirs were 
erected by this early race as monuments to their ancestors. The 
English archeologist, James Miln, who lived for many years at _ 
Carnac, and who founded and built the interesting local museum : 
which bears his name, tells us in his “ Fouilles Faites a Carnac” 
that after taking into account the association in this region of 
menhirs, of alignments,.of cromlechs, and of dolmens, he con- 
- cludes that “these monuments are the débris and the remains of 
an immense necropolis,” and perhaps this is the more natural and 
logical view to hold. At the same time, while this involves the 
worship of their ancestors, the sun may also have shared in their 
adorations. 
Judging by the contents of the dolmens, some bronze bracelets 
and other articles having been found in them, these megalithic 
monuments were erected during a period of transition from the 
stone age to the age of bronze; and they are supposed to be 
contemporaneous with the pile dwellings of the stone age of 
Switzerland. Who were these stone axemen, these neolithic stone 
masons, who could with their polished celts quarry, and could 


