Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 1 (1897).djvu/80

54 hut circles. Many there are who hold that these circles were places of burial and nothing more; interments have been found in some (just as they may be found in some churches), but not in all of them, and the absence of interments in some shows that burial was not, as a rule, their primary object. Others consider the circles of standing stones to be merely the remains of the circular walls of large stone towers, but that idea hardly requires serious notice. On Dartmoor there are also numerous long rows of small standing stones, which frequently have a small circle, with or without a barrow inside it, at one end of the line, or it may be a barrow without a circle. One of these lines is nearly two miles long, and extends from one of the "sacred" circles to a barrow, which was no doubt a tomb. Nothing really like these stone rows is found anywhere but on Dartmoor, and what the idea underlying their construction was is most uncertain. If, when they were erected, the fogs on Dartmoor were as frequent as they are now, the "rows" might have helped the inhabitants to find their way about; but there was most likely some more occult reason for their construction than that. About forty of these rows are still left on different parts of Dartmoor.

The ancient population of the moors, which was apparently more numerous than that of the present day, must have left considerable quantities of refuse in the shape of bones, which, if they could be found, would enable zoologists to tell us what animals and birds they reared, or hunted, and lived upon; and amongst the bone and shell-heaps might be found further fragments of tools, weapons, and pottery, which would also add to our information about their manners and customs, but their "kitchen-middens" have yet to be discovered and reported upon.

The tombs of the hut-dwellers have for the most part been broken into and their contents scattered long ago, so that we know little about their physical characteristics. They are generally supposed to have been a small dark-haired race, and the size of some of their dwellings, and particularly the dimensions of the entrances to them, seem to favour that view; but, although we are not so well informed upon these points as we could wish, the excavations recently made enable us to form a fair idea of their manner of life. We can imagine the women