180 



Silbury. 



when the only substances of which the arms and domestic imple- 

 ments of the primitive races were formed, were of bone or of flint 

 and stone, we can readily imagine that comparatively few of that sort 

 would be met with, their probable scarcity, and the obvious difficulty 

 of recognizing them being considered; whereas when bronze and iron 

 came into use, particles at least of those metals, from their greater 

 durability and greater likelihood to attract observation on the part 

 of the antiquary, would, in so large an excavation, have in all 

 probability come to light had they existed at the period of the 

 raising of the mound. Therefore, though I by no means attach 

 great weight to the argument, it may, (I think) be fairly stated, and 

 weighed for as much as it is worth, that the absence of even the 

 smallest particles of bronze or iron indicates a period prior to the 

 age of metals. And as the absence of all relics seems to me to 

 bespeak its antiquity, so no less does the absence of all allusion to 

 the hill in old writers point the same way : for had it been thrown 

 up during the age of letters, or had even the tradition of its erection, 

 its date, its founders, or its object come down to the period when 

 the Romans occupied this country, it is inconceivable that no men- 

 tion of so grand a work would have been made : whereas I can 

 easily imagine, that when no record and no tradition of its intention 

 existed, and the very memory of the race who raised it had passed 

 away, and the Romans found it the same grand but mysterious 

 tumulus, which we see it to be now, they might easily pass it by 

 without mention, having indeed nothing to record regarding it. 

 Moreover, we have seen that the simple earthwork unsupported by 

 stone or brick, was the most early method of commemorating their 

 dead, among nations the most uncivilized, and of the greatest anti- 

 quity : indeed if it be true that the Cimmerians when expelled from 

 the shores of the Euxine (as Homer relates) proceeded West ; were 

 called Celts and Gauls ; spread over France and England, 1 and were 

 our British ancestors, as some have conjectured ; we know that 

 their practice was to heap a vast tumulus of earth over their dead 

 long before the Scythians took possession of their country, a recol- 

 lection of which custom they must have carried with them when 

 1 Antiquities of Kertch, by Dr. Mac Pherson, p. 2. 



