or crevice for the forgiveness of sins;--a survival purified and
ennobled in the service of God.

The oldest of all religious monuments of which we have any existing
trace are cromlechs, found mostly in waste, uncultivated places. These
are of various forms, but they are mostly tripods, consisting of a
copestone poised upon three other stones, two at the head and one at
the foot. The supports are rough boulders, the largest masses of stone
that could be found or moved; and the copestone is an enormous flat
square block, often with cup-shaped hollows carved upon its surface.
Under this copestone there was a vacant space, varying in size from a
foot or two to the height of a man on horseback. Through this vacant
space persons used to pass; and the narrower the space, the more
difficult the feat of crawling through, the more meritorious was the
act. In our own country there are numerous relics of this primitive
custom. In Cornwall there are two holed stones, one called Tolven,
situated near St. Buryan, and the other called Men-an-tol, near
Madron, which have been used within living memory for curing infirm
children by passing them through the aperture. In the parish of
Minchin Hampton, Gloucestershire, is a stone called Long Stone, seven
or eight feet in height, having near the bottom of it a large
perforation, through which, not many years since, children brought
from a considerable distance were passed for the cure of measles and
whooping-cough. On the west side of the Island of Tyree in Scotland is
a rock with a crevice in it through which children were put when
suffering from various infantile diseases. In connection with the
ancient ruined church of St. Molaisse on the Island of Devenish in
Loch Erne in Ireland, there is an artificially perforated stone,
through which persons still pass, when the opening will admit, in
order to be regenerated. If the hole be too small, they put the hand
or the foot through it, and the effect is thus limited. Examples of
such holed stones are to be found in some of the old churches of
Ireland, such as Castledermot, County Kildare; Kilmalkedar, County
Kerry; Kilbarry, near Tarmon Barry, on the Shannon. In Madras,
diseased children are passed under the lintels of doorways; and in
rural parts of England they used to be passed through a cleft ash
tree. At Maryhill, in the neighbourhood of Glasgow, about a year ago,
when an epidemic of measles and whooping-cough was prevalent, two
mothers