Roman troops garrisoned the Watling-street so far as High Rochester (Bremenium) and probably held a western road up to Birrens (Blatum Bulgium?). These points, strangely enough, are the ends of the Roman road system as detailed in the Antonine Itinerary, and the coincidence suggests that the evidence of the inscriptions is more than an accidental negative. On the forts along the roads south of these points we find numerous inscriptions belonging to Alexander Severus, Gordian III., Philip, and the like, such, e. g., as the dedication to Dea Garmangabis erected by a troop of Suebi at Lanchester.

STONEHENGE

BERTRAM C. A. WINDLE

HE surmises as to the nature and origin of Stonehenge

TH

have been most numerous and most varied. Of course, it has been associated with the Druids, the last resort of all in search of an author for any ancient monument, and according to one writer these Druids were a Phoenician colony who came to Britain in the time of Abraham, and brought the patriarchal religion-whatever that may have been-with them, whilst another writer says that the Druids were certainly Brahmins and that "Stonehenge is evidently one of the temples of Boodh."

Another effort explains it as a monument erected to Boudicca, whom we used to call Boadicea in the uninstructed days of our youth, and the convincing arguments by which this claim is established are (1) that the battle in which that ill-fated queen was killed was fought upon a plain, and (2) that Dion Cassius, the historian, tells us that the Britons "intombed their Queen with solemn and magnificent pomp." These arguments are quite in the style of some of those set forward in our own day for the establishment of the theses of the wilder kind of folklorists.

Stonehenge has been called-with no shred of reason-a Mithraic shrine, and it has been also suggested that it

might have been a sort of British "Tower of Silence," where dead bodies were laid to be devoured by birds and insects, wild beasts being kept off by a kind of zareba of thorns inserted between the upright pillars of the trilithons.

Stukeley, an imaginative archeologist who assigned reasons and names for ancient objects because it struck him that such reasons or names were pretty and attractive, thought that Stonehenge and other like edifices were consecrated to snake-worship. He gave the name of Dracontium to such an edifice and has a pretty but largely imaginative rendering of Avebury-that greater Stonehenge in northern Wiltss—as a snake, with an eye, passing through a circle and weaves quite a thread of folk-lore around his mythical design.

It now remains to be seen whether recent researches have thrown any light upon the date and purpose of stone circles in general and of Stonehenge in particular.

On the last day of the last century two of the stones of the outer circle and the lintel thereof fell to the ground, and this fact coupled with the obviously insecure condition of some of the other stones and the recent formation of a great military camp in the immediate vicinity of the monument led to steps being taken to secure Stonehenge from further damage and to make good that which had recently occurred. The work was carried out under the immediate direction of Professor Gowland, than whom no more competent person could possibly have been found, and the results which have been obtained from the necessary excava