ngland, we feel
certain that something will be done to preserve what can still be
preserved of Celtic remains from further destruction. It does honor to the
British Parliament that large sums are granted, when it is necessary, to
bring to these safe shores whatever can still be rescued from the ruins of
Greece and Italy, of Lycia, Pergamos, Palestine, Egypt, Babylon, or
Nineveh. But while explorers and excavators are sent to those distant
countries, and the statues of Greece, the coffins of Egypt, and the winged
monsters of Nineveh, are brought home in triumph to the portals of the
British Museum, it is painful to see the splendid granite slabs of British
cromlechs thrown down and carted away, stone circles destroyed to make way
for farming improvements, and ancient huts and caves broken up to build
new houses and stables, with the stones thus ready to hand. It is high
time, indeed, that something should be done; and nothing will avail but to
place every truly historical monument under national protection.
Individual efforts may answer here and there, and a right spirit may be
awakened from time to time by local societies; but during intervals of
apathy mischief is done that can never be mended; and unless the damaging
of national monuments, even though they should stand on private ground, is
made a misdemeanor, we doubt whether, two hundred years hence, any
enterprising explorer would be as fortunate as Mr. Layard and Sir H.
Rawlinson have been in Babylon and Nineveh, and whether one single
cromlech would be left for him to carry away to the National Museum of the
Maoris. It is curious that the willful damage done to Logan Stones, once
in the time of Cromwell by Shrubsall, and more recently by Lieutenant
Goldsmith, should have raised such indignation, while acts of Vandalism,
committed against real antiquities, are allowed to pass unnoticed. Mr.
Scawen, in speaking of the mischief done by strangers in Cornwall, says:--

"Here, too, we may add, what wrong another sort of strangers has
done to us, especially in the civil wars, and in particular by
destroying of Mincamber, a famous monument, being a rock of
infinite weight, which, as a burden, was laid upon other great
stones, and yet so equally thereon poised up by Nature only, as a
little child could instantly move it, but no one man or many
remove it. This natural monument all travellers that came that way
desired to behold; but in the