Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 1 (1897).djvu/79

Rh raw material was brought from a part of Devonshire thirty miles away, to be worked up at this place. Mr. Francis Brent, F.S.A., of Plymouth, has collected much valuable information about flint stations in Cornwall, but has unfortunately not yet published it.

On the slopes of Brown Willy and Rough Tor, which are the highest points of Cornwall, there are numerous hut-circles and enclosures which have not yet been explored; some of these are smaller than those of Dartmoor and Carnbrê, and were covered with roofs of stone and turf built up in the same way as the walls; one of them is still perfect, and at least one other has part of the roof remaining. There also are five circles of standing stones, the diameters of which, as I have pointed out elsewhere, seem to have been carefully measured, as indeed do the distances between the circles themselves; their positions also appear to have been carefully selected, so as to bring them into certain lines with the tops of the surrounding hills. All these things point to an observance of the sun and stars for religious or astronomical purposes, or both, and to some amount of communication, casual it may be rather than regular, with the East, which we should hardly expect to find in conjunction with such rude dwellings and appliances of living as the excavations already described show to have belonged to the people by whom the circles were almost certainly erected. But it must be borne in mind that rough ways of living are by no means incompatible with high intellectual capacity, and that the habitations of parts of Ireland and Scotland in which many of our most useful public men have first seen the light have not been very superior to those of Carnbrê or Dartmoor. Another reflection arising from this is that the dwellings in Ireland and elsewhere which strike visitors from England as being so extremely uncivilized, are not the result of degradation of the inhabitants, but rather of their not having advanced in that particular much beyond the fashions of their ancestors of two or three thousand years ago.

There are circles of standing stones on Dartmoor, some of which seem to have been arranged in relation to some of the surrounding hills, or to single stones standing near, and which were almost certainly constructed by the people who lived in the