NOTES AND QUERIES. 



369 



am induced to ask you to find room in your next issue for these cursory 

 remarks of mine. 



I may perhaps remark first that there is a fine specimen of a logging-stone 

 at Lustleigh, somewhat similar in shape to that of St. Levin's, Cornwall, shown 

 in your engraving last month. 



Lustleigh is a small village in the Dartmoor district, about four miles from 

 the Blackistone Rock, also shown in one of your engravings. The wildness 

 and beauty of the neighbourhood of this village will amply repay a visit from 

 any of your readers who may happen to take the West for their holiday-ramble 

 this year. It is about fourteen miles from Exeter. The precipitous hills, per- 

 haps I ought to say mountains, for mountains they are in a geological sense, 

 and the immense granite-rocks, in vast numbers, protruding from the ground 

 give an air of the wildest confusion to the scenery, so that we might easily 

 picture to the mind the tumultuous scene once upon a time enacted there, and 

 which may be yet again. 



Being a somewhat of an antiquarian, as well as a geologist, I cannot keep 

 silence when I see the formation of the rock-basins scientifically explamed 

 away, yet explained away it is not, for nothing is settled ; and the suggestions 

 of both Dr. M'Culloch and Mr. Ormerod seem to me higlily improbable, as in 

 a great measure also do the remarks of Mr. Jones. 



In all the basins, whether deep or shallow, at times may be found quartz and 

 felspar fragments of an angular shape, and sometimes schorl mixed with it. 

 These materials form a sand of various degrees of coarseness — sometimes fine, 

 sometimes coarse, and are blown into the basins by the wind, but in no case 

 are they formed of the dehris of the granite-basin in which those materials are 

 found. That many of the basms have been enlarged by the decomposing power 

 of water and the action of the atmosphere cannot, I think, be doubted ; but to 

 ascribe the actual formation of all the rock -basins to such a cause is a far- 

 fetched supposition, and totally unwarranted by the facts. 



Much of the porphyry of Dartmoor is of a very soft nature, extremely liable 

 to decomposition from the united agency of the atmosphere and water ; and 

 the eye can quickly detect the harder and softer rocks. These rock-basins 

 were undoubtedly at one time all circular, and were equally undoubtedly the 

 work of Druidic hands. This is not the place to enter into the mystical 

 symbolical circhc rites of the Druids, suffice it to say, therefore, that the circle 

 was to them a holy tlnng ; that such basins were used by them in their 

 worslup ; and that they chose earth's wildest scenes as their temples. 



About eight or nine years since there was near Blackistone Bock a series of 

 basins cut one into the other, in perhaps one of the hardest and most solid 

 rocks of the whole district (the following sketch is a section) ; and, moreover, 



on one of the faces of the rock was carved a representation of a bullock, some- 

 what worn away it is true by the mouldering work of centuries, yet still 

 beautifully plain. The various basins were, so hard was the rock, almost as 



