NOTES AND QUliBlES. 
369 
am induced to ask you to find room in your next issue for tliese cui'sory 
remarks of mine. 
I may perhaps remark first that there is a fine speeimen of a logging-stone 
at Lustieigh, somewhat similar in shape to that of St. Levin's, Cornwall, shown 
in your engraving last month. 
Lustleigli is a small village in the Dartmoor district, about four miles from 
tlic Blackistonc Rock, also shown in one of your engravings. The wildness 
and beauty of the neighbourhood of tins village will amply repay a visit from 
any of your readers who may happen to take the West for their hoHday-ramble 
this year. It is about fourteen miles from Exeter. The precipitous liiUs, per- 
haps I ouglit 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 explained 
away, yet explained away it is not, for nothing is settled ; and the suggestions 
of f)oth Dr. M'Culloch and Mr. Ormerod seem to me highly 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 ■\\'ith it. 
Tiiese materials form a sand of various degrees of coarseness — sometimes fine, 
sometimes coarse, and ai-e blown into the basins by the wind, but in no case 
are they formed of the (h'bvis of the granite-basin in which those materials are 
found. That many of the basins 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 circUe rites of the Druids, suflice it to say, therefore, that the circle 
was to them a holy thing ; that such basins were used by them in their 
worship ; and that they chose earth's wildest scenes as their temples. 
About eight or nine years since there was near Blackistone Rock a series of 
basins cut one into tlie oilier, in ]5erliaps 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. Tiic various basins \\ere, so hard was the rock, abnost as 
