Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/642

636

of battle, but why so many were needed to overcome one poor saint is not stated. Old customs and superstitions cling long to a rude uncultured people. They change slowly. While accepting the new ideas or religion, they do not give up the old. Both may flourish side by side.

Some of the stone monuments of Brittany were probably reared or constructed as late as the christian era. As late as the time of Gregory of Tours, the worship of stone monuments was still so prevalent as to call forth an edict of the church putting under a ban all who persisted in still adhering to it, while in some of the remote valleys of the Pyrenees, according to some of the best authorities, the worship of stone exists at the present day.

There seems to be considerable evidence that the people who built Stonehenge and Avebury and erected the menhirs and alignments of Brittany were sun-worshipers, and while a monolith or megalithic monument may have been regarded with veneration and worshipped itself, originally it was simply the symbol and representative of something greater. These customs would not die out easily among a rude clannish people even after the introduction of Christianity, and furthermore, we are all sun-worshipers more or less.

The age of these marvelous and mysterious monuments can not be told in years, but in a more general way. They are not all of the same age; some date as far back as the Neolithic period, many belong to the age of bronze, while others are as recent as the christian era. Since