ARCHITECTURE. 107 
monuments consist mainly of single or several blocks of stone, put together 
with rude strength, and bear witness of the time when all finer cultivation 
was unknown to the people who erected them. From them to the period of 
an enlightened architecture there is one immense bound, for there was no 
gradual advance among those people who received from the Romans and 
other strangers who came and settled among them their culture and art, all 
complete. If, then, we wish to examine the style of building peculiar to 
these people, we must go back to the most remote antiquity, and begin with 
single stones. 
The use of rough stones as monuments is traceable to the earliest times, 
but they had a lofty purpose, for among more than one people they were 
honored as the symbol of the divinity. In almost all countries of the world 
such idol-stones are found, which were the objects of the worship of the 
early races of those lands. The north, especially, abounds in them. Eng- 
land, Scotland, the Hebrides and the Orkneys, Germany, Hungary, Sweden, 
Denmark, Russia, Siberia as far as Kamtschatka, offer specimens of them, 
as well as Tartary, Thrace, Greece, China, and the coasts of Africa. Even 
in the new world they occur. 
The Celtic monuments, so far as we know them, seem to have all served 
either for worship or sepulture. Only a very few appear to have been 
devoted to domestic purposes, and we shall presently endeavor to 
discover the intent of a number of them. 
A chronological order in the description of these monuments might be 
difficult to follow, for though some savans have sought to do this, yet they 
have no authority for their work, and the only point that can be taken for 
granted is, that none of these monuments were erected after the invasion of the 
Romans into those countries. All are of Druidical origin, and the Drnuidical 
worship was everywhere suppressed by the religion of the conquerors. Of 
course these remarks do not apply to the mounds, for they were nothing 
but burial-places, at which there was no further worship than that of 
memory. In our description we must necessarily employ the Celtic names, 
so long as no other nomenclature exists, except our translation of these 
names. 
1. Men-nir or Pevtvans. An upright perpendicular stone, standing by 
itself, consecrated to prayer or to remembrance, was called men-hir (long 
stone) or peulvan (stone pillar), or finally, men-sash (straight stone). In 
England it is called stone-henge, from stone and henged or hung up, floating; 
and this generic name is now the peculiar title of the greatest Celtic 
monument in England, situated in Wiltshire. The men-hir, the simplest 
and the most numerous of the Celtic monuments, seem to have had very 
various purposes. Merely human purposes they subserved in only two ways, 
as boundary stones, and as monuments of great recollections. In religious 
ways the men-hir served partly as symbols of the divinity, partly as monu- 
ments upon the graves of heroes, for three or four men-hir indicated the grave 
of a chieftain. The excavations among the sepulchral monuments reveal 
bones, weapons, boars’ tusks, antlers of deer, &c. If the men-hir was only 
the memorial of some important event, there are only weapons there; if 
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