others a monument for the dead, as Mr. Aubrey, and the like. Again, some
will have it be British, some Danish, some Saxon, some Roman, and some,
before them all, Phoenician.

I shall suppose it, as the majority of all writers do, to be a monument
for the dead, and the rather because men's bones have been frequently dug
up in the ground near them. The common opinion that no man could ever
count them, that a baker carried a basket of bread and laid a loaf upon
every stone, and yet never could make out the same number twice, this I
take as a mere country fiction, and a ridiculous one too. The reason why
they cannot easily be told is that many of them lie half or part buried
in the ground; and a piece here and a piece there only appearing above
the grass, it cannot be known easily which belong to one stone and which
to another, or which are separate stones, and which are joined
underground to one another; otherwise, as to those which appear, they are
easy to be told, and I have seen them told four times after one another,
beginning every time at a different place, and every time they amounted
to seventy-two in all; but then this was counting every piece of a stone
of bulk which appeared above the surface of the earth, and was not
evidently part of and adjoining to another, to be a distinct and separate
body or stone by itself.

The form of this monument is not only described but delineated in most
authors, and, indeed, it is hard to know the first but by the last. The
figure was at first circular, and there were at least four rows or
circles within one another. The main stones were placed upright, and
they were joined on the top by cross-stones, laid from one to another,
and fastened with vast mortises and tenons. Length of time has so
decayed them that not only most of the cross-stones which lay on the top
are fallen down, but many of the upright also, notwithstanding the weight
of them is so prodigious great. How they came thither, or from whence
(no stones of that kind being now to be found in that part of England
near it) is still the mystery, for they are of such immense bulk that no
engines or carriages which we have in use in this age could stir them.

Doubtless they had some method in former days in foreign countries, as
well as here, to move heavier weights than we find practicable now. How
else did Solomon's workmen build the battlement or additional wall to
support the precipice of Mount Moriah, on whi