nought may now be learned save by an examination of those tombs
themselves, and of the dumb remnants, from time to time exhumed out
of their soil--rude instruments of clay, flint, brass, and gold,
and by speculations and reasonings founded upon these archaeological
gleanings, meagre and sapless.

For after the explorer has broken up, certainly desecrated, and
perhaps destroyed, those noble sepulchral raths; after he has
disinterred the bones laid there once by pious hands, and the urn
with its unrecognisable ashes of king or warrior, and by the
industrious labour of years hoarded his fruitless treasure of stone
celt and arrow-head, of brazen sword and gold fibula and torque;
and after the savant has rammed many skulls with sawdust, measuring
their capacity, and has adorned them with some obscure label, and
has tabulated and arranged the implements and decorations of flint
and metal in the glazed cases of the cold gaunt museum, the
imagination, unsatisfied and revolted, shrinks back from all that
he has done. Still we continue to inquire, receiving from him no
adequate response, Who were those ancient chieftains and warriors
for whom an affectionate people raised those strange tombs? What
life did they lead? What deeds perform? How did their personality
affect the minds of their people and posterity? How did our
ancestors look upon those great tombs, certainly not reared to be
forgotten, and how did they--those huge monumental pebbles and
swelling raths--enter into and affect the civilisation or religion
of the times?

We see the cromlech with its massive slab and immense supporting
pillars, but we vainly endeavour to imagine for whom it was first
erected, and how that greater than cyclopean house affected the