Wiltshire Downs in a Hundred Square Miles round Abury. 61 



barrows are but few in number and insignificant in value, wbich 

 seems to indicate a very high antiquity. The district illustrated in 

 Mr. Smith's work affords several examples of Early British camps : 

 the difficult problem as to how these camps were supplied with 

 water receives much illustration from details given of the con- 

 struction of dew-ponds. The downs, as distinguished from the 

 valleys, were the natural position for the dwellings of the early 

 tribes, and this tract of country so fully investigated yields many 

 examples of pit-dwellings. The famous Wansdyke, too, gives a 

 characteristic sample of those stupendous earthworks, which must 

 have been made at the cost of almost incalculable labour. Earth- 

 works of another class which Mr. Smith considers to be cattle-pens 

 are numerous, as are the terraces or lynchets on the sides of the 

 hills. The sarsen stones, of which the stone-works of the Early 

 Britons in North Wilts are constructed, exist in countless thousands 

 in this district, and their positions are indicated on the map. Their 

 geological characteristics are easily summed up as " masses of sand 

 concreted together by a silicious cement, left scattered over the 

 ground when the lower portions of the stratum were washed away," 

 but the question as to how such vast masses as form the trilithons 

 of Stonehenge were moved and set up is not so quickly answered. 

 Mr. Smith does not think it necessary to attribute to the Early 

 British masons any extraordinary mechanical knowledge, remembering 

 how much can be effected by sheer force of numbers, aided by such 

 simple mechanical contrivances as the roller, the lever, and the wedge. 



It is somewhat remarkable that North Wilts possesses very few 

 relics of the Romans. The only tangible evidences of undoubted 

 Roman work within the area treated of are the fragments of two 

 Roman roads. 



No one is more competent to write of the early inhabitants of 

 this island than Mr, Smith, and as, in the district he is dealing with, 

 almost all classes of primaeval remains are represented, we have in 

 this volume a complete and most valuable digest of all that is known 

 on the subject. He calls it a very matter-of-fact volume, and so 

 indeed it is; but the facts are marshalled with such admirable 

 clearness, and every statement and quotation verified by full and 



