them in the light of general archæology, it is by no means impossible to see our way to many safe deductions.

One of the oldest symbols of divinity is fire, and in many important and most ancient religions the maintenance of a perpetual fire was an essential institution. If we view the cromlech as a shrine for this sacred fire, we seem to have at once an answer for many difficulties. Thus, for instance, we see why structures so imposing, and which, in many cases, must have been works of immense labour, were erected at a time when we can neither trace nor presume the existence of parallel labour in other directions, whether public or private. Wherever we have accurate information, we see that the great works of every era and country are religious or defensive, and that sepulchral monuments rarely, if ever, assume proportions in any way approaching to those of the religious erections of their time and place; for it is not to be expected that any people will do more for the memory of dead kings or heroes than they will for the worship of the living gods to whom they look up for every blessing. It is, therefore, incongruous with all our certain knowledge that such vast labours should be devoted to mere tombs in an age when the dwellings of the proudest chiefs, and, in this case also, the temples of the most venerated gods, were of too frail a character to leave a vestige of their existence to remote times.

As sacred shrines, and the equivalents of the temples of later days, the character of these monuments is quite natural. Erected in an age of stone axes and hammers, they are necessarily rude. Meant to endure for centuries, they are composed of vast blocks firmly set up, and often poised with great skill and ingenuity, while their smoother surfaces are always turned inwards, a point which would be of far too little consequence to be so universal as it is had these monuments been intended to be filled up with earth, buried under a mound, and never disturbed.

As to location, these monuments are placed on commanding eminences or extensive plains, where, as in the case of the Teocallis of Mexico, the ceremonies of religion could be witnessed by thousands of worshippers. We often find them, in these circumstances, with no vestige of a mound connected with them, and not unfrequently in cases where it cannot be imagined, with any show of reason, that a mound could ever have existed-as, for instance, in the case of the cromlech which stood in the great work at Abury, within one of the two inner circles. In many of these structures no vestige of interment has ever been detected, as far as is known. Even when placed on mounds, they are often entirely exposed and entirely empty, except when soil has

partially accumulated, or sand has been driven in by the wind, as has been distinctly stated of so many of these works in India. On this view, also, it is natural to find in so many cases permanent passages leading to these chambers; and still more characteristic are the evidences furnished of the long-continued action of fire on the floors of many of them, so much so that this fact has entered into the general description which Worsaae gives of the superposed cromlechs of Denmark. "The floor of the chamber itself is paved partly with flat stones, partly with a number of small flints, which appear to have been exposed to a very powerful heat." 1

In this view also the connection of the cromlech, first with the stone circle, and subsequently with the mound, is quite natural. Both are well-known religious symbols. The circle represents the zodiac or solar course, the universe, &c., &c.; the mound is the type of the sacred mountain which plays such an important part in many mythologies, as the residence of the gods and the final resting-place of deified heroes. And thus at last the conjunction of the three symbols gives us the prototype of some of the most imposing structures of India.

In this train of associations, too, we seem to see the early stages of the cavern worship which in India and Egypt produced so many remarkable monuments. The cromlech becomes partially covered in ; it becomes a cave; there is a passage leading to it up the mound. Finally, it is placed on the floor of the mound, and the mound itself assumes imposing dimensions. The sacred fire would now be placed in this sanctuary, accessible only to the priests, the general worship being conducted on the summit of the mound, where sacrifices might be offered up, and victims slain in the presence of the crowds spread over the surrounding plain. A little wooden chapel on the summit of Silbury Hill, or the mound of New Grange, would at once convert these structures into Teocallis, on which the priests of Huitzilipochtli might have slaughtered their human victims, or kindled the sacred fire at the commencement of a new age.

In nearly all the great centres of religion there has been a tendency to bury the dead in sacred places, in the vicinity of temples, and often within them. In many cases we find that the temple of a god was also supposed to contain his tomb, and in numerous instances, when kings were the presumed descendants of gods, the traditions of mythology became practical institutions, and mound-burial, among other

1 Primaval Antiquities, p. 80.

things, was the usage for distinguished personages. This custom fixed, nothing would be more natural than to bury important chiefs in the cromlech mounds, still traditionally sacred, even when belonging to a long-perished creed. Then the passages would be closed up, if the cromlech was on or within a mound, and, if otherwise, a mound would be thrown over it, and this, of course, would be without a passage.

On this view we can see how the pyramids of Egypt, originally terraced or graded structures, in many cases all but identical with the Teocallis of Mexico and Central America, would have a king buried in their inner chamber, and then have their terraces or grades filled up with masonry or bricks, as we now see them, and be thenceforth not the abandoned temples of a perished creed, but the tombs of a series of kings.

In this view also the monuments of Western Europe are brought into far more intimate and important connection with the general stream of ancient thought than they can be brought on the received theory. Nor is there anything surprising, on this principle, in our occasionally finding in such works interments of widely different eras, even when such interments are plainly the original ones. But the great fact which would stand forth luminously, upon this hypothesis, is that, however old might be the interments, the monuments themselves were vastly older still; and a fact like this is well worth the trouble of being carefully tested: for, should such a state of things turn out to be true, the face of remote antiquity would be changed, and we should see Western Europe, even in the stone age, anticipating the preeminence which it is again assuming in these later times. We should, perhaps, see these islands of ours, a great seat of dominion, trafficking in the Mediterranean, erecting temples or shrines in Portugal, in Italy, in Palestine, in Persia, carrying their arms and their creeds into the Baltic, and finally planting an empire even in Southern India. We do not, of course, say that these things were really so, but we do say that there are numerous and startling hints of some such events, and that the entire subject demands a most careful study.

We have been led farther by this topic than we intended. We meant to have more confined our remarks to the volume before us, though, perhaps, in the case of a work which is essentially one of materials rather than of opinions, we should have failed within our limits to give a just idea of it. The reader must consult for himself in a case like this. He will find a full and fair account of the entire range of facts and current opinions connected with the early remains of man as discovered in the drift, in the kjökkenmöddings, in peatbogs, in lake-habitations, in mound burials, &c., &c. There are two

chapters on the Brazen Age, one on the use of stone in ancient times, and then follow successively Tumuli, Lake-habitations, Danish Kjökkenmoddings or shell-mounds, North American Archæology and Cave men, to each of which topics a special chapter is devoted. After this come two chapters on the Antiquity of Man, three on Modern Savages, and finally one devoted to a concluding survey and its inferences.

These chapters on savages will be found full of interest; and it is a strictly scientific process to study the present so as to make it throw light upon the past. This process is one of the keys of geology, and we must make it one in archæology also. Our author has by no means wasted his time, or that of his readers, in thus giving a résumé of the peculiar facts which the savage state at present exhibits. Many of these facts may be familiar to some of us, but there are few who have read so extensively as to be able to turn over these chapters without deriving from them much instruction. Our limits will not permit the consideration of such specialities of opinion as Sir John Lubbock has here advanced or favoured; but one thing, at all events, we can say for the book-viz., that, whether we agree with it or not, no one can possibly quarrel with it, for a more conscientious and unassuming work it would not be easy to meet with.

ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION. THE current number of the Anthropological Review has an article devoted to the "Prospects of Anthropological Science at the British Association of 1865." It urges the standard claim of the Anthropological Society of London to have anthropology recognised in the Association by a distinct section, not only on the ground of its being an important science, but also on that of its being as yet unrecognised in that body, this second position being based on the theory that Ethnology, which is recognised, is not the same science as Anthropology, but a wholly subordinate one, a mere department of anthropology.

Had the purely scientific aspect of the question been adhered to in this paper, we should have had nothing to do but simply to refer to the article in our last month's issue, in which the entire subject is discussed in detail; but the writer has chosen to attribute unworthy motives to the opposition made to the claims in question, and we are compelled to allude to the

subject lest our silence might be claimed as a recognition of the justice of such charges.

The writer talks of the "ungenerous motives of a faction in the Ethnological Society." To those who really know that society, and the character of its proceedings, such a charge will be simply ridiculous. Baseless in itself, it is introduced without a particle of evidence, and is directed against men utterly beyond the littleness which it implies, to say nothing of its more serious aspects. If members of the Ethnological Society have opposed the claims in question, they have done so on the same grounds that other scientific men have opposed them; or, if there be any thing special in their opposition, it has been based on the conviction that Ethnology and Anthropology are not two sciences, as certain anthropologists wish to make out, but one and the same science under two distinct names. Not a shadow of evidence is adduced to show that their asserted belief is not perfectly conscientious, and yet the writer does not hesitate to attribute their opposition to unworthy motives; and this gratuitous charge he calls "lifting the veil"! And it is so, indeed, but not in the sense intended.

"The real motive," he further adds, of the opposition of ethnologists, "is simply jealousy of the increasing popularity of our science and number of our adherents." To make charges which cannot be proved, and which can only be met by simple denial, is a mode of argument which may suit certain orders of mind; but we should have fancied that, in a case which is assumed to be so strong, an effort would have been made for some better argument than simple abuse and mere assertion.

No doubt ethnologists, like other people, look with some curiosity at the rapid growth of the new society and make their comments thereon. This growth is altogether a phenomenon. We see nothing like it in any other scientific body in the country. But the reason is obvious: the laws of this growth are special, and such as our other scientific societies have not adopted, nor are likely to adopt. Rather than grow on these terms the Ethnological Society would infinitely prefer to dissolve at once.

"On no scientific grounds can ethnologists continue their opposition." Such is another of these confident statements; but this one fortunately does admit of something more than denial; and a full answer to it was before the public in our last number, simultaneously with the charge itself. The burden of defence now rests on those who have ventured to make so rash an assertion.

We shall not follow the writer in his eloquent peroration-in his hope that, "in the name of honesty and the common love of truth which scientific men profess," ethnologists will not "resort to a fresh series of