in 1663, went to see the Celtic remains of Abury, sixty-three
stones were still standing within the intrenched inclosure. Not quite a
hundred years later they had dwindled down to forty-four, the rest having
been used for building purposes. Dr. Stukeley, who published a description
of Abury in 1743, tells us that he himself saw the upper stone of the
great cromlech there broken and carried away, the fragments of it making
no less than twenty cart-loads. After another century had passed,
seventeen stones only remained within the great inclosure, and these, too,
are being gradually broken up and carted away. Surely such things ought
not to be. Let those whom it concerns look to it before it is too late.
These Celtic monuments are public property as much as London Stone,
Coronation Stone, or Westminster Abbey, and posterity will hold the
present generation responsible for the safe keeping of the national
heirlooms of England.(59)

XIV. ARE THERE JEWS IN CORNWALL?

There is hardly a book on Cornish history or antiquities in which we are
not seriously informed that at some time or other the Jews migrated to
Cornwall, or worked as slaves in Cornish mines. Some writers state this
simply as a fact requiring no further confirmation; others support it by
that kind of evidence which Herodotus, no doubt, would have considered
sufficient for establishing the former presence of Pelasgians in different
parts of Greece, but which would hardly have satisfied Niebuhr, still less
Sir G. C. Lewis. Old smelting-houses, they tell us, are still called
_Jews' houses_ in Cornwall; and if, even after that, anybody could be so
skeptical as to doubt that the Jews, after the destruction of Jerusalem,
were sent in large numbers to work as slaves in the Cornish mines, he is
silenced at once by an appeal to the name of _Marazion_, the well-known
town opposite St. Michael's Mount, which means the "bitterness of Zion,"
and is also called _Market Jew_. Many a traveller has no doubt shaken his
unbelieving head, and asked himself how it is that no real historian
should ever have mentioned the migration of the Jews to the Far West,
whether it took place under Nero or under one of the later Flavian
Emperors. Yet all the Cornish guides are positive on the subject, and the
_prima facie_ evidence is certainly so startling that we can hardly wonder
if certain anthropologists discovered even the sharply marked features of
the Jewish race among the stur