accidental, and their value is so small that they could not have been buried there for concealment. They must have had something to do with some funereal rite or superstition, the memory of which has passed away. No ancient British or Gaulish coins have ever been found in similar positions, and no Christian coins, which, had their presence been purely accidental, would probably have been the case. The inference seems to me inevitable that they were looked on as valued relics or curiosities, and placed there intentionally by those who raised the mounds it may be very long after the dates which the coins bear.
Dolmens.
There is nothing specific in the Rude Stone Monuments of France sufficient to distinguish them from those of the other countries we have been describing. They are larger, finer, and more numerous there than in either Scandinavia or the British Isles, but except in the negative peculiarity of there being no circles in France there is little to distinguish the two groups. It can hardly even be absolutely asserted that there are no circles in France. There are some semicircles, which may possibly have been parts of circles never completed; there are some rows of small stones around or on tumuli; but certainly nothing that can for one moment be classed with the great circles of Cumberland and Wiltshire, or those of Moytura and Stennis, and certainly nothing like the innumerable Scandinavian examples.
We are hardly yet in a position to speculate why this should be so; but, so far as I can at present see, I would infer from this that the French examples are, as a rule, of earlier date than the British and Scandinavian. The circle I take to be one of the latest forms of rude stone architecture—the skeleton of a tumulus, after the flesh of the sepulchral mound, which gave meaning to the group, had been thrown on one side as no longer indispensable. But of this we shall be better able to judge as we proceed.
Another characteristic, although not a distinction, is the fondness of the French for the "Allée couverte" or "Grotte des fées." No examples of this form have yet been brought to light in England, but one is engraved (woodcut No. 80) as the Hag
