Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/692

672 top of the decorated face of the stone has been shaped into a pediment rising to a kind of base supporting a cross on which is sculptured in bold relief a Christ holding a cup in each hand. The execution of these figures is rude, but the style of some of the designs relates them to the age of Louis XIII, or the beginning of the seventeenth century. The paint with which they are colored can not but suffer from the weather and has to be renewed at times. It looks now comparatively fresh.

Among the dolmens that have been sanctified by the church, some have been used as supports for the cross, and others have been transformed into altars or converted into chapels. Besides the cathedrals of Chartres and Puy, which according to local traditions were built over dolmens very anciently held in reverence, many examples may be cited of megalithic structures which bear the marks of the more or less important modifications they have suffered in view of their changed destination. The partly fallen dolmen of Cruz-Molten, not far from Carnac, bears a very simple stone cross that takes the place of an ancient historical one, of which a view appears on a picture made in 1845. Another monument consists of a slab which is supposed to have belonged to a dolmen, that rests upon four pillars supposed to have been borrowed from neighboring ruins, and supports a cross apparently more recent. The monument supposed to be the tomb of St. Ethbin at Port Mort, which people having kidney troubles pass under on certain days to be cured, was a dolmen, for which a table supported by four small columns was substituted about 1875. So probably was the Grosse Pierre of Ymase, a roughly squared slab with a cross cut in one of its corners, sustained by two stone supports, and under which people passed to be cured of various diseases. A rectangular slab resting on four large square pillars at the entrance of the cemetery of Arcy-Saint-Restitue came from a dolmen and is the scene of a sort of religious ceremony. St. Margaret's stone in the commune of Petit Lessac is a large, heavy slab of rough granite resting on four columns of the eleventh or twelfth century, with a stone altar underneath. It was once covered by a chapel, the walls of which could till recently be traced on the surface of the ground.

At Canges de Onis, near Oviedo, in the northeast of Spain, is a little church, built probably in the tenth or eleventh century upon a tumulus of broken stones covering a dolmen. The dolmen, in the shape of a circular chamber with a passage leading to it, is composed of fifteen supports and four tables. It constitutes a part of the church, and was formerly used as a crypt. It has been explored at different times, and a few articles of stone and copper have been found in it. Pere Càrvallo, a writer of the seventeenth century, says that in his