190 On Uingshury and other Camps in North Wiltshire. 



temple could witness to no higher effort at construction, it is not likely that any 

 such was exhibited in their dwellings. A people who had not learnt to put one 

 stone upon another, and who had not yet used tools to dress stones (if they had 

 them), must have resorted to other contrivances for that shelter from the weather 

 which the human frame requires. Whore rocks presented the means, caves 

 would be hollowed out, or where natural action had already hollowed out the 

 cave, we have witness that men used them. But where no rocks were to be 

 found, as on our Wiltshire downs, the only other resource at the hands of such 

 unskilled men was to imitate the wild animal in his instinct, and burrow their 

 homes in the earth. That such was the case we know from the ancient British 

 earth-dwellings that have been discovered on the downs and elsewhere. 



Then, in that far distant age, for which the accepted chronology finds no place, 

 when mankind were in the first rudiments of existence, their temples were stones 

 raised on end in circular order, and their dwellings were caves or earth-burrows. 



And that these vestiges of that far distant age are not local or descriptive of 

 the condition of mankind in one or two spots on the earth, is evident from the 

 fact which is gathering strength year by year, that these primitive temples like 

 A bury are scattered over the face of the earth, witnessing one common religion 

 for its inhabitants, and witnessing, at the same time, what is more to my point 

 that the range of civilization was the same everywhere, and rude unskilled man, 

 whilst rearing such temples to his god, could but " hide himself in holes in the 

 earth." 



The universality of this worship, which tradition, and its most natural 

 probability, would seem to say was that of the sun, has its witness in circular 

 megalithic temples in every quarter of the world. The instances, which I have 

 been able to collect, of such temples prove that the religion, whatever it was, 

 was once the religion of India, China, Southern Europe, Arabia, North Africa; 

 and a friend of mine, whilst shooting the " Ovis Ammon " in the wilds of Thibet 

 came upou a " Druid Temple," as he called it, in perfect circle in the bottom of 

 a valley remote from all intercourse with the rest of the world. And these 

 instances are multiplying continually of the existence of these primitive temples 

 in many unexpected quarters, witnessing, as I have said, not only to a common 

 worship, but to a strange level of existence of the human race throughout the 

 world at the time they were building. 



Of course this fact, which is assuming a commanding strength of proof, can 

 find no room for itself in the limited chronology that is generally accepted. But, 

 if we enlarge the time of man's existence since the Deluge by several thousand 

 years, we can imagine a state of things in which it would be possible for the 

 human race to have remained long undeveloped— in one sameness of existence, 

 with habits of life but little varied, and with one common worship symbolized by 

 the common temple, found almost everywhere. 



If so, then it seems impossible to assign so recent a date as even the most 

 remote that is given in the many histories of Abury for the building of its temple. 

 And the original builders must be placed far back in the distant ages, when 

 mankind were dwellers in caves and earth-burrows, and when the same hands 

 that dug the foss and reared the mound round Abury, dug the foss and raised the 

 mounds of Barbury, Kingsbury, and the rest. 

 It is from these considerations that I draw the conclusion that those many 



