from any habitations. Within thirty yards of it, to the south, there is a low barrow, enclosed by a circle of small stones; it is quite round, and 18 feet in diameter. There are several

such around here, not far from the circles, all partaking of the same type. Most of them have been disturbed. The Strathspey Gaelic name for these stone circles and cairns is "Na carrachan,' which implies a nominative singular "car," evidently from the same root as cairn.

The examination and study of these Inverness-shire circles and rude stone monuments raise the most important questions as to the intention and the plan of construction of stone circles. The three concentric circles seem developed, architecturally speaking, from the chamber cairn, encircled at its base, and with another circle at a distance. The next step would seem to have been the ring cairn. Possibly the reason for the ring cairn may consist in the fact that the builders could not, on their bee-hive system, and with the stones they used, as seen in the chambered cairns at Clava, construct chambers on so large a diameter as all the undoubted ring cairns have in their innermost circle, such as those of Clava, Gask, Grainish, and Delfoor, all of which are over 20 feet in diameter. The third step might have been to drop the building of the ring cairn, which would thus leave the three concentric circles, so peculiar in their character, in that they have a middle circle evidently designed for forming an outer ring intended to bound a cairn so as to keep it together. Druid Temple at Leys, Inverness, presents a good example of stone circles evidently not completed by cairn of any kind, and yet having traces of avenue, which so few of them have. It also shows the state of preservation in which the ravages of time and the last century or two of stone-building have left these monuments of a remote antiquity.

In regard to the purpose of building these structures, the answer which the interrogation of them gives to the inquirer depends mainly on his individual theories. The construction of the central and middle circle, I believe, is developed from the chambered cairn, but it is in regard to the outer circle that the real difficulty exists. What is the purpose of it? The chambered cairns are, by most antiquarians, connected with burial, though other theories, as we shall see, are held. In any case, burial deposits and urns were found in the Clava chambered cairns, a fact which connects them somehow with burial. It does not appear that the other circles have been yet scientifically explored; at any rate burial deposits have not been found except in the

doubtful instances of Druid Temple and Gask. An urn was found in a gravel cutting near the former, and bits of bone have been found in the debris which lies in the interior of the latter.

In Ireland, besides the famous mound of New Grange, with its surrounding circle of monoliths, and the several other mounds on the Boyne, where, according to old Irish history, repose the fairy heroes of Ireland's golden age--the Dagda and his compeers, in whom modern research recognises the old deities of the Gaelbesides these there are the "battlefields" of the two Moyturas, the "tower fields" as the name means, which are literally strewn with circles, mounds, and stones. The stone circles here are often alone, and often in connection with the mounds, cairns, and dolmens. It was on these Moytura plains that the fairy heroes overcame their foes of ocean and of land-the Fomorians and the Fir-bolgs; so Irish history says, and the dates of these events are only some nineteen centuries before our era! In England, several good specimens of stone circles still remain in the remote districts, districts such as Cornwall and Cumberland; they are often single circles unattended by any other structure; but there is a tendency toward their existing in groups, some circles intersecting one another even-such groups as at Botallick in Cornwall, Stanton Drew in Somersetshire, and others. The most famous stone monuments in England, or in these Isles, are those of Stonehenge and Avebury. The remains at Avebury, from the immense size of the outer circle (1200 feet) and its external rampart, its remains of two sets of contiguous circles, each set being formed of two concentric rings of stones, and its two remarkable avenues of stone, each of more than a mile in length, the one winding to the south-east, the other to the south-west-these remains have brought Avebury into rivalry with Stonehenge, with which it contests the honour of having been, as some think, vaguely heard of by the Greeks before the Christian era. Stonehenge, however, though much less in extent-its outer circle is only 100 feet in diameter, which is just about the average of the outer circles of Inverness-shire-is much better preserved and much better known. It differs in various ways from the usual type of circles and their accompaniments, though preserving the general features. In the first place the stones are "dressed so far as to render them more suitable for contact with, or superimposition of, other stones. Stonehenge is therefore not quite a "rude stone monument." This dressing of the stones was connected with another, though less unique, feature of these circles. This is what is known as the trilithons. These are composed of two upright pillar stones set

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