While Horse Jottings. 



57 



having* seen on an island in the mysterious lake of Peten, the figure 

 of a white horse, which the people called " Tzirnin chak " — chak in 

 their language signifying white. 



So you see, with so many conflicting opinions, we are still very 

 far from knowing the real history of our most perplexing Wiltshire 

 antiquities ; but the world is not yet exhausted, enormous tracts of 

 country, hundreds of islands, are yet absolutely unexplored. It is 

 impossible to say what in these days of fresh emigration and 

 ransacking of the globe may not come to light. Perhaps in some 

 cannibal island, eight thousand miles under our feet, may yet turn 

 up the key to that other great riddle on Salisbury Plain— 

 Stonehenge. 



tSSjjite Povse Settings. 



By the Rev. W. C. Plendekleath. 



HE following paper contains the substance of sundry jottings 

 as to the White Horses of our county which I have 

 put together since I addressed the Society upon the subject at 

 Trowbridge, in 1872. i 



We are all acquainted with the venerable Wiltshire tradition 

 which asserts that the Westbury Horse, as it existed up to the year 

 1778, was cut out by King Alfred in Easter, 878, on the morrow of the 

 victory of Ethandune. I know that this tradition is now discredited : 

 I should be astonished if it were not so. For finality is a thing 

 which cannot I fear, be predicated of any branch of human know- 

 ledge. And I have even heard of persons so depraved as to say 

 that whenever an unusually positive assertion is made by scientists 

 of any description the one only thing of which we may be sure is 

 that the exact reverse will be asserted with equal positiveness a little 

 later. I remember that a great many years ago when large exca- 

 vations were going on upon the Palatine Hill, at Rome, the then 



Wiltshire Archceological Magazine, vol. xiv., p. 12. 



