Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 14, 1903.djvu/28

16 Why it should be thought that piling great stones over them would be an effectual way of keeping them under ground is not clear; but that is the flight of imagination to which we owe cairns and megalithic monuments, the pyramids of Egypt, and the very mausoleum itself, and which is represented to us in our own day by the strange fine art of the cemetery mason.

Milton's answer indicates another association of the monument than that which gave it its origin:

9. In the second place, I propose to submit the question from the point of view of history. To suggest that that is a point from which even prehistoric times may be viewed is not such a contradiction in terms as it would seem at first sight to be; for by the use of the convenient method of analogy, we may guess from the records relating to the lower races of mankind at the present time what the primitive races were likely to have been. I need not repeat what I said last year as to the aborigines of Australia; that if they had dim surmises as to a Supreme Being, they also indulged in fancies as to their own origin and future condition, as to their relations with other animals, and with the spirits which they imagined to lurk in thickets and rivers and rocks, and as to the consequences that would follow any breach of their social contract. It is not a violent assumption that early races of man had some such dim fancies as these, though we should not be safe in attributing all even of these to the primitive aboriginal imagination.

10. I may, however, add to what 1 then said the testimony