with this Clue, the Author proceeds to consider the most remarkable Druid Monuments of Britain.-The Carns, the Cromlech, the Logan, the Tolmeh, of the Druids, successively described, and mythologically explained. -Stonehenge, a solar Temple; the great Circle the Disc of the Sun; the Number of Stones composing it, including Thirty Impost and Thirty Uprights, Sixty, the sexagenary Cycle; a Cycle first formed in India, but early adopted in China, The Adytum, or Cove, of Stonehenge, an Oval, representing the mundane Egg, or Universe; its inner Circle of Stones, Nineteen in number.-The grander serpentine Temple of Abury considered.-Serpents ever, in the East, Emblems of astronomical Cycles.—Their mythological History. The great Circle of Columns at Abury, consisting of One Hundred Stones, represents the Sun's Progress through a Period of One Hundred Years, or a complete Century. The lesser Circle of Thirty, the Druid Age.--The least of Twelve, the Pe

riod of Jupiter's Revolution, which, multiplied by Five, forms in India the great sexagenary Cycle.

HA

AVING in the preceding sections from the first authority, shewn that the Northern Asia was principally possessed by two great nations, the one polished and literate, and the other barbarous, and unlettered; having also shewn the original descent and the accidental mixture of those two nations, and traced the progress towards Europe of the great body of the Scythian, or Celtic, colonies, infected with all the superstitions of the Indian Buddha, or Woden of the North, that renowned, but obscure, character, who flourished at the commencement of the present age, or period, and who married Ila, whose father, according to Sanscreet annals, was preserved in a miraculous ark from an universal deluge; we come, in the present section, to the consideration of the particular superstitions known to have flourished, during the earliest periods, in these islands; superstitions too congenial with those anciently celebrated in Asia, to allow any doubt of their having been imported by the earliest

VOL. VI.

H

earliest Asiatic settlers. The first that demands our attention is their attachment to

THE WORSHIP OF RUDE STONES IN CONSECRATED GROVES; AND THEIR SANGUINARY SACRIFICES OF MEN AND BEASTS.

UPON the commencement of the Theological Dissertation, in the first volume of the Indian Antiquities, I had occasion to remark, from Keysler, that the ancient IndoScythians performed their sanguinary sacrifices" under groves of oak of astonishing extent and of the profoundest gloom,”* and I cursorily traced the vestige of those barbarous rites in Gaul and Britain. I also instanced, from Herodotus, their peculiar mode of sacrificing to the rusty cimeter, the symbol of Mars, the god Hesus of the Druids, the victims taken in war; and I adduced more than one instance of similitude which the national manners of Scythia bore to those of the war-tribe of India. Without crediting all the extravagant assertions of Bailly and De Guignes, concerning the unfathomable antiquity of the primitive

*Vol. ii. p. 36.

proto

prototypal race of Asia, who were doubtless Cuthite colonies, at that remote imaginary period, when the line of the equator passed through the middle of the vast deserts of Tartary, and made the frozen soil of Siberia fruitful, we may safely allow the martial progeny of Scythia, by intermixture and commerce, to have influenced, in a great degree, the habits and customs of their Indian neighbours, and to have been reciprocally affected by those of the people with whom they thus accidentally communicated. I shall not attempt to ascertain in which region the very peculiar veneration which either nation entertained for sacred forests of immense extent originated; it is sufficient for my purpose that this very striking point of affinity anciently existed between the Tartarian and Brahmin magi. The relentless Diana of the Tauric grove was probably no other than the stern Nareda, or Cali, of the Indians. Their characters are consentaneous, and their rites accord in dreadful unison. With the Scythians, a tall and stately tree, with wide-spreading arms, was the majestic emblem of God; and though Herodotus asserts that they had temples and images, his assertion is not confirmed by any other historian of antiquity. In fact, their temples consisted

consisted only of vast heaps of colossal stones, rudely, if at all, carved; and in the most unwieldy stone, as well as in the most lofty tree, they, like the Indians, contemplated the image of that Deity, of whom their perverted imaginations conceived the majesty and attributes to be best represented by gigantic sculptures and massy symbols." While we are treating on this subject of the oaken groves of the Druids, and the abominable sacrifices with which they were contaminated, it is impossible to avoid remarking how widely this very custom of venerating Bætyla, or consecrated stones, and of worshipping under oaks, was diffused in the remotest periods over the whole Oriental world, and in what profound veneration this very tree was holden by the ancestors of the human race. It was under the consecrated oak that God and his holy messengers condesceded to hold converse, and to enter into solemn covenants with the patriarchs. Abraham," we read, passed through the land to the place of SICHEM, and (ad alloun Moreh) to the OAKGROVE OF MORET, where the Lord appeared unto him, and said, Unto thy seed will I give this land: and Abraham builded there an altar unto the Lord." Gen. xii. 6. In another part

of