THE PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS. 
33 
that they are records of battles, least of all. We greatly err in 
regarding war as the main business of life with these ancient 
dwellers in Dunmonia. The lines are almost always connected with 
well-defined and accepted sepulchral monuments, and, where they 
are not utilitarian, must- be placed in the same category. 1 
There are many ways of talking prose without knowing it. How 
often, in considering these relics of the past, have we recognized the 
fact that every churchyard repeats the tumulus in the grave mound, 
the cromlech or dolmen in the altar tomb, the chambered barrow in 
the vault, the menhir in the obelisk or column, these very parallel- 
itha in the rows of headstones which make a well-accustomed 
cemetery a minature Karnak • nay, that the urn still enjoys formal 
recognition, though cremation has not returned to fashion. Need the 
riddle be so very hard to read 1 ? Burial in rows is a common 
custom with many nations. The Chinese thus arrange the bodies 
of their ancestors in their family burial places, in the belief that 
they secure the protection and aid of the spirits of the departed 
while the line remains unbroken. 
The Dartmoor hut rings and villages have been regarded as the 
dwellings of ancient tinners. Such, beyond doubt, in part they 
were; but they are not confined to Dartmoor, nor are they 
peculiarly associated with tin-bearing districts. They are found 
throughout the moors of Devon and of Cornwall, whether the scenes 
of mining enterprise or not ; they occur all over the British Isles ; 
and to go no further afield we may point to Worlebury, at Weston- 
super-Mare, with its hut rings and piled stone ramparts, as almost 
the precise analogue of the antiquities of which Grimspound is our 
favourite type. 
The hut rings are dwellings of a simpler and commonly earlier 
1 There are ancient stone-faced hedges on Dartmoor which, were the earth 
removed, would present avenues precisely identical with those of Merivale ; 
vide Perambulation of Dartmoor, p. 58, for remarks on the " track-lines or 
boundary banks," the primitive hedges of the moor, common wherever there 
are traces of habitations. At the same time it may very well be that the 
circles were, in their origin, connected with solar worship, symbols of the 
girdling horizon ; and that the association of interments has a religious 
character. And if the words church and circle do come from the same root, 
as suggested by some etymologists, we have a survival in ecclesiastical 
language even more remarkable than the retention of special relations to the 
East — the sunrise. 
