lerably
close, and its low passage besides serving no purpose would be
inconvenient.

There is really no reason to derive either the dolmen or the
corridor-tomb from dwellings at all. Granted the use of huge stones,
both are purely natural forms, and the presence of the corridor in the
latter is dictated by necessity. The problem was how to cover a large
tomb-chamber with a mound and to leave it still accessible for later
interments, and the obvious solution was to add a covered passage
leading out to the edge of the mound.

A remarkable feature of the megalithic tombs is the occurrence in many
of them of a small round or rectangular hole in one of the walls,
usually an end-wall, more rarely a partition-wall between two chambers.
Occasionally the hole was formed by placing side by side two upright
blocks each with a semicircular notch in its edge. Tombs with a holed
block or blocks occur in England, instances being the barrows of Avening
and Rodmarton, King Orry's Grave in the Isle of Man, Lanyon Quoit in
Cornwall, and Plas Newydd in Wales, which has two holes. There are also
examples in Ireland, France, Belgium, Central Germany, and Scandinavia,
where they are common. Passing further afield we find holes in the
Giants' Graves of Sardinia, and in Syria, the Caucasus, and India, where
half the dolmens in the Deccan are of this type. The holes are usually
too small to allow of the passage of a human body. It has been suggested
that they served as an outlet for the soul of the deceased, or in some
cases as a means of passing in food to him.

Attention has been frequently drawn to curious round pits so often found
on the stones of dolmens and usually known as cup-markings. They vary in
diameter from about two to four inches, and are occasionally connected
by a series of narrow grooves in the stone. They vary considerably in
number, sometimes there are few, sometimes many. They occur nearly
always on the upper surface of the cover-slab, very rarely on its under
surface or on the side-walls.

Some have attempted to show that these pits are purely natural and not
artificial. It has been suggested, for instance, that they are simply
the casts of a species of fossil sea-urchin which has weathered out
from the surface of the stone. This explanation may be true in some
cases, but it will not serve in all, for the 'cups' are sometimes
arranged in such regular order that their artificial origin is palpable.
These markings are f