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SECOND DIVISION.

OF STONE STRUCTURES, BARROWS, &C.

To obtain correct ideas on the subject of the first peopling and the most ancient relations of our native country, it will not be sufficient to direct attention exclusively to objects exhumed from the earth. It is at the same time indispensably necessary to examine and compare with care the places in which antiquities are usually found; otherwise many most important collateral points can either not be explained at all, or at least in a very unsatisfactory manner. Thus we should scarcely have been able to refer, as we have done in the previous pages, the antiquities to three successive periods, if experience had not taught us that objects which belong to different periods are usually found by themselves. It is not however all places where objects are discovered which will here be treated of in a similar manner. For instance a great number of antiquities are found in peat-bogs, but who could safely maintain that such articles had lain there ever since the period when they were generally used, and have not been mingled at a later period with more modern objects lost or thrown in there. It will not be the places where antiquities may be casually met with, but rather our ancient stone structures and barrows, which, with reference to the subject just mentioned, ought to be the subject of a more particular description; for as to the graves themselves we know that, generally speaking, they contain both the bones of the dead, and many of their weapons, implements, and trinkets, which were buried with them. Here we may therefore, in general, expect to find those objects together which were originally used at the same period. The barrows serve to explain in various other ways the associations of pagan