the fame as those at Stonehenge, brought from Marlborough-Downs, where the country-people call them SARSENS, from a Phonician word for a rock.

Although the disfigured plan and ruined ftate of this vaft Druidical fane forbid us to speak concerning it with all that preciseness and decifion neceffary to the establishment of a new hypothefis; yet my conjecture of the ftones being placed in number and order confonant to ideas founded in aftronomy, borders nearly upon certainty, when we confider the various corroborating circumftances in the preceding account. The remarkable numbers 100, 60, 30, and 12, conftantly occurring, unavoidably bring to our recollection the great periods of aftronomical theology; the century, the fexagenary cycle of India, the thirty years which formed the Druid age, the twelve figns of the zodiac, and the number of years in which the revolutions of Saturn are performed; of which, multiplied by five, it has been previously observed, the fexagenary cycle was originally fabricated. Thus the great circle confifts, we are told, of 100 ftones; the whole temple is furrounded with a circular rampart, 60 feet broad, and with a ditch of exactly the fame breadth, and the two concentric circles,

Dr.

cles, inclosed within the greater, the outermoft confifts of 30, the inner of 12 ftones. Stukeley computes that the two avenues, the one leading to Kennet, the other to Beckhampton, were each formed of 190 ftones; but, as of these so very few remained for him to form a juft computation by, we may fairly, upon the ground of analogy, and as having an equal reference to aftronomical calculation, ftate the number of each to have been 180, which, doubled, gives the total amount of the days of the ancient year, before it was reformed by the fuperior correctness of modern aftronomers. That the Orientals ac→ tually did regulate their defigns in architecture by fuch fanciful rules of menfuration is evident from what Diodorus Siculus tells us," that the walls of Babylon were built by Semiramis, of the extent of 360 furlongs, to mark the number of days of the ancient year, He adds, the employed in that vaft undertaking no lefs than two millions of men, and one ftadium was erected every day, till the whole was completed within the period of that year, the length of which the measure of their circumference was intended to reprefent.* Nor did they confine their aftronomi

* Diod. Sicul. p. 120.

cal

cal allufions to architecture only, for they entered largely into their religious and civil ordinances, fince the fame author informs us, that, at the tomb of Ofiris, during the days of lamentation, the priests, who were appointed to bewail his death, daily poured out libations of milk from 360 vafes,* to denote the days of the primitive year, used in the reign of that monarch; and, again, that, at Acanthe, near Memphis, on the Lybian fide of the Nile, it was an ancient immemorial custom, on a particular feftival, for 360 priefts to fetch water from the Nile, in as many veffels, from that river, and then to pour the water into a great receiver perforated at the bottom; by which ceremony they reprefented both the days of the ancient year and the ceaseless lapse of irrevocable time. Another ftill more remarkable ftory of this kind is recorded by Herodotus, who acquaints us, that Cyrus, in his expedition against Babylon, in order to render the river Gyndes fordable for his army, as well as from a curious species of revenge for the lofs of one of the confecrated horfes of the fun, drowned in the previous at

* Diod. Sicul. lib. i. p. 26. Rhodomanni.

+ Ibidem, p. 209.

tempt

tempt to pass that stream, divided it into 360 channels, the number of the degrees through which the fun himself paffes in his progress through the zodiac.*

These are all plain veftiges of the folar devotion, as well as proofs of its univerfal influence which spread from the plains of Babylon, where it originated under Belus, to the rocks and forefts of Britain, first tenanted by his pofterity the Belidæ, that primæval colony who inftituted the Bealtine, and who, according to Mr. Bryant's and my own supposition, were the fabricators of Stonehenge and the defigners of Abury. Dr. Stukeley, alfo, we fee, estimates the whole number of ftones interspersed throughout the ftupendous work of Abury to be 650; but, for the reasons alleged above, no great violence will be offered to probability if we state them as 600, which is the precife period afferted by Josephus, from the traditions of his nation, to have been known to the ante-diluvians, and stated by him to have been their annus magnus.† By this cycle of fix hundred years, which Bailli terms lunifolar, Jofephus is fuppofed to have

* Herodoti, lib. i. p. 189.

† Jofephi Antiq. Judaic. lib. i. cap. 3.

meant

meant the period wherein the fun and moon return to the fame fituation in the heavens in which they were at the commencement of that cycle; and it is of this cycle that the great aftronomer Caffini, cited in Long, speaks with such rapture, for he observes, that this grand period, of which no intimation is found in the remaining monuments of any other nation, except the ancient Hebrews, is the finest period that ever was invented, fince it brings out the folar year more exactly than that of Hipparchus and Ptolemy, and the lunar month within about one fecond of what it is determined by modern aftronomers. If, adds Caffini, the ante-diluvians had fuch a period of 600 years, they must have known the motions of the fun and moon more accurately than they were known fome ages after the flood.*

But to refume the confideration of other interesting and important matters fuggefted by the furvey of Abury. When the reader recollects all that has been remarked in the preceding volumes concerning the northern afpects of the GATES of the ancient caverns and temples, it will be no fmall corroboration

VOL. VI.

* Long's Aftronomy, vol. ii. p. 653.

L

of