By William Gowland, F.S.A., F.I.C. 



31 



must often be filled with water in winter, and its alternate freezing 

 and thawing could not have failed to have caused a very much 

 greater amount of disintegration than their sides now present, had 

 they been cut by the builders of Stonehenge. 



Moreover, that the monoliths were not shaped by cutting holes 

 along the line of desired fracture is, I think, satisfactorily proved 

 by the large blocks of sarsen which were found in the excavations. 

 These, it is not unreasonable to assume, had been detached from 

 some of the monoliths in the process of shaping them, yet on none 

 are there any traces of such holes. All, without exception, had 

 simply rudely fractured surfaces. 



This rough shaping of the sarsens doubtless generally took place 

 at the spots where they were found ; the final dressing only being 

 performed in the immediate neighbourhood of the sites where they 

 were to be set up. 



To remove the inequalities resulting from this treatment, to 

 reduce the stones to a proper thickness, and to give to their faces 

 the slightly curved surfaces 1 which many of the monoliths present, 

 evidently required more tedious operations. 



The mode in which these ends were attained is clearly evident 

 on examining the surfaces of some of the stones, notably Nos. 59, 

 54, and the underside of 55<x. On these will be seen several broad 

 parallel and shallow grooves having a more or less prominent rib 

 between them. This is well seen on the fallen stone. 



These grooves were undoubtedly made with the stone mauls by 

 violently pounding the stone with them in a line running longi- 

 tudinally over the surface to be levelled or removed. 



The action of a maul so used on the sarsen rock of which the 

 stones consist was this : each blow fractured and disintegrated the 

 surface over a considerable area^and to a considerable depth, forming 

 a shallow cavity, varying in size with the hardness of the rock and 

 the violence of the blow. The procedure was as follows : — one or 



1 It may be mentioned incidentally that the same curved surfaces are found 

 on the internal faces of the huge megalithic blocks of which the dolmens in 

 Japan are constructed whenever these are of hewn stone. See Archceologia, 

 lv. 464, 



