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Silbury. 



seen no arguments of any force, while there are many prima facie 

 reasons to induce us to assign this as its origin. For though it is 

 perfectly true that nothing indicating it to be a place of sepulture 

 was discovered, either by the Duke of Northumberland and Colonel 

 Drax, when they sunk their shaft from the top towards the close of 

 the last century, 1 or by the Archaeological Institute, when they 

 drove their tunnel into the centre from the side in 1849, 2 yet I 

 contend that these failures proved nothing more than the unpropi- 

 tious fortune of the excavators : for if the vast area of the whole 

 mound be considered, and the comparatively narrow passages which 

 pierced it to its centre, like puny bodkins probing a whale, 3 surely, 

 (to use a homely proverb,) it was like searching for a needle in a 

 hay-rick, and a marvel it would have been, if without a clue to 

 guide them, they had hit upon the cromlech, always supposing 

 one, or more (for there may be several), to exist. 



Again, however geometrically exact the engineer may have been 

 in driving his tunnel into the exact centre, and however accurately 

 the perpendicular shaft may have attained the same spot, (though 

 by the way they did not meet, for it was in cutting a diagonal 

 passage from the tunnel that the workmen came upon the shaft,) 4 

 yet how improbable is it, that the cromlech would retain its position 

 in the exact centre, assuming for a moment (which I shall presently 

 show to have been unlikely) that it was intended to be near the 

 middle of the mound : for even in this case, those rude workmen, (the 



hangs, as it were, brooding over Silbury-Hill, in order to bring again to a new 

 life the person there buried." [Abury, p. 41.] 



1 Douglas's .Nenia Britanniea, p. 161. 



2 Without at all impugning the decision of the late Dean of Hereford, who 

 heard their statements, it would have been satisfactory to have learned on what 

 grounds he rejected the testimony of the two old men in the neighbourhood 

 whom he examined, and who both asserted that the miners from Cornwall who 

 dug into Silbury by direction of the Duke of Northumberland in 1777 found " a 

 man," meaning a skeleton. [Salisbury Journal, p. 74.] 



3 This is an allusion to a large whale stranded on the coast of Norfolk 

 (of w T hose death throes I was an eye-witness from a yacht) despatched at last 

 Toy a ship's spit, after an hour's fruitless attempts on the part of some fishermen 

 to reach some vital part with their short knives. [See Zoologist for 1851, 

 p. 3134.] 



4 Salisbury Journal, p. 300. 



