is shown surrounded by a sacred enclosure, as if being itself the "Numen" to be honoured. At Malta, as before remarked, they certainly were not altars, because pedestals, which were unmistakably altars, are found in the same apartments, and they are very unlike them. They seem more like the great saucers in the Irish tombs, and may have served the same purposes; but altogether these Balearic outside tables are unlike anything we know of elsewhere.
Rude-stone circles seem to be not uncommon in combination with the talyots and tall altars, and on the whole they seem to bear as much affinity to the monuments of Spain as to those of Sardinia, but again till we know more it is idle to speculate on either their age or uses beyond the conclusion drawn from all similar monuments — that their destination was to honour departed greatness.
It would be not only interesting but instructive to pursue the subject further, for the monuments of these islands deserve a more complete investigation than they have yet received; but this is not the place to pursue it. Indeed, it is only indirectly that they have any connection with the subject of this work. They are not megalithic in the sense in which the word is generally used. Nor are they rude, for all the stones are more or less shaped by art, and all are used constructively. In none of them is the stone itself the object and end of the erection. In all it is only a means to an end.
It is their locality and their age that import them into our argument if there is anything in the connection between the monuments of France and Algeria, as attempted to be shown above. Whether the African ones came from Europe, or vice versâ, it must have been in consequence of long-continued intercourse between the two countries, and of an influence of the dolmen builders in the Western Mediterranean which could hardly have failed to leave traces in the intermediate islands, unless they had been previously civilized and had fixed and long-established modes of dealing with their own dead.
Assuming that the nurhags and giants' towers extend back to the mythic times of Grecian history, say the war of Troy—and some of them can hardly be more modern—it will hardly be contended
