Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 1 (1897).djvu/81

Rh spinning, cooking in the holes by the hearths, and preparing the skins of the animals killed in the chase by the men, and making garments from them; while around them the children, who probably wore no clothes at all in hot weather, played at rude games, or imitated the more serious pursuits of their parents. We can picture to ourselves the men hunting, fishing, tending their cattle, and perhaps engaging in some rudimentary agricultural employment, or manufacturing flint tools and weapons from the lumps of flint which in Cornwall were obtained from the north-east, either by parties organized from their own villages, or from caravans of traders from beyond the Tamar. We may even suppose a priesthood supervising the erection of the sacred circles, and carrying on some sort of ceremonies therein, or taking part in funereal rites, and in the construction of barrows with long lines of stones stretching away across the country from them; and we may conclude our brief and imperfect survey of this ancient people and their remains with the reflection that the mere erection of regular circles and long lines of stones, although the stones were much smaller than those of Abury, Stonehenge, or Stanton Drew, demanded an amount of constructive skill, of careful planning, and of organized effort, actuated by some common underlying purpose or idea, which we cannot properly attribute to savages of so low a type as those by whom some other parts of the world are even yet populated; and that, poor as the manner of life of these early inhabitants of Devon and Cornwall may have been, they had yet advanced some distance beyond the first steps of civilization.