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civilised and educated person there are none, for savage belief is eminently practical and unsentimental. To project the highest feelings and opinions of civilised man-and these local, too-into the early state of man, is to overlook the long perspective of time with its evolution of ever higher feelings and beliefs. The lowest phase of belief has been named by Mr Tylor, "animism": it consists in believing that what is presented to us in our dreams and other hallucinations has a real objective existence. Savage man makes little or no difference between his dreaming and waking state. He sees the "shadows" of the dead in his sleep, and believes in their objective reality. But not merely the dead have shadows or spirits; the living, too, have a spirit duplicate of self. The reflection in water proves this no less than the presentiment of the living man in dreams. Hence it is that the savage dislikes the photographer. Animals and material objects, of course, have souls, on the same grounds, for the dead hero appears in dreams with ghost of hatchet, sword, and spear. "The Zulu will say that at death a man's shadow departs and becomes an ancestral ghost, and the widow will relate how her husband has come to her in her sleep, and threatened to kill her for not taking care of his children; or the son will describe how his father's ghost stood before him in a dream, and the souls of the two, the living and the dead, went off together to visit some far-off kraal of their people." The funeral sacrifice of historic nations, of early Greeks, Romans, and Celts, show how barbaric religion includes the souls of men, animals, and material objects; for what was useful to the dead when alive was burnt or buried along with them-chariots, arms, horses, dogs, and even wives and slaves were sacrificed in one mighty holocaust. The religious creed in which "animism" embodies itself is, of course, the worship of the dead, especially the worship of ancestors. Worship and reverence, here, have a different sense from our ideas of them. The dead are worshipped for protection, and repaid with reverence, not merely in feeling, but also in practical gifts and sacrifices at their tombs. It may quite as often happen that their wrath is deprecated. From the mere family ancestor, the worship may rise to that of great chiefs and kings that are departed, and from that it may rise to a conception of a supreme father-"The old old one" of the Zulus, as they work back from ancestor to ancestor, thus arriving at an idea of a creator, akin to the conception of the "Ancient of Days." One's own ancestor may be good to one; other people's ancestors may be the reverse. Hence these last have to be propitiated; evil spirits are worshipped to avoid their wrath. Thus the ghost

of a British officer was not long ago worshipped in India as a god, and on his altar his demon-worshipping votaries placed what they thought would please and appease him, for it had pleased him in this life, namely, offerings of cheroots and brandy! In fact, all the ills that life is heir to are among some races attributed to evil spirits, while the good is the work of the beneficent spirits; and among such tribes it is through the medicine-man, with his exorcisims, there is the only means of escape. Let it be noted that ancestral ghosts may not merely exist in proper human form, but they often assume animal forms, and what is more, they may even take up their abode in material objects-trees, stones, or anything. Hence arises "fetish" worship-the worship of "stocks and stones." And it is also easy to see that we may, on the other hand, rise from ancestor worship, through this transmigration idea, to the height of polytheism, with its gods of sun, moon, and sky.

This reverence of the savage for the dead is therefore con nected with his regard for himself. His religion, as usually happens in higher phases of culture, is selfish. The dead are therefore cared for and their abodes become places of worship. Various ways are adopted for disposal and worship of the dead. The hut they lived in may be left as a dwelling for them; the body may be buried in a canoe or coffin; a strong tomb may be built over it or its ashes, and this tomb may be a chamber with access to it to enable the votaries to bring offerings. Great labour was bestowed on these burial mounds of earth and stone. Nor have we yet ceased from this display, though we now have different methods and far different feelings in our burial rites. Yet there are survivals of ancient forms. "In the Highlands of Scotland," says Mr Tylor, "the memory of the old custom [raising of mounds and cairns] is so strong that the mourners, as they may not build the cairn over the grave in the churchyard, will sometimes set up a little one where the funeral procession halts on the way." Our memorial stones over the graves are but the descendants of the old menhirs; nor are dolmen forms absent in the stone box structures often placed over graves. In the Churchyard of Rothiemurchus, on the grave of Shaw Cor-fhiaclach, the hero of the North Inch at Perth, there used to be a row of small pillared stones set round all the sides of the tombstone. Circles of stone other than such far-off imitations as this we do not use now.

Burial and worship in early society go hand in hand, and we, therefore, conclude that these stone circles were used for both burial and worship, but more especially for worship, since mere

reverential memorials were, at that stage of culture, an impossibility. Nevertheless there yet remains one part of our inquiry to which an answer has not been given. Why should the stones be set up at intervals, and in a circle? For all that our inquiry has proved is that the dead were worshipped at their graves; it does not necessarily answer the more particular question of a peculiar form of grave or burial enclosure. The circular form and the pillared stones set at intervals remain, after every elimination, the only difficulty of the enquiry. Mr Fergusson developed the idea of the circle from the circular mound, but he could not account for the stones being set at intervals, and not close together. Canon Greenwell suggested, as we saw, that their use was to "fence" in the ghost of the departed. It is a superstition in the Highlands yet that evil spirits can be kept off by drawing a circle round oneself. Another suggestion made is that the number of stones may have had something to do with the number of worshippers, as is said to be the case in the Dekkan. It was also the custom at the Hallowe'en fires for everyone to place a stone in a ring round the fire as they were leaving, and, if by next morning, anything happened to any of the stones, the person who placed it there was fated to meet death or ill during the year. The Arabs still set up stones of witness, whenever they first catch sight of certain holy places. The stones in the circle may have been "wit1 ness" stones, or else stones at which sacrifice was made. Yet the regularity of their number, generally ten or a dozen, forbids much hopeful speculation in these lines. Another theory connects the burial circle with phallic worship; the circle itself would answer to the yoni symbol and the menhirs upon it to the linga. The principles of life and of death would thus be worshipped together, which is not an uncommon circumstance. The cup-markings so often met with on burial monuments lend additional weight to this view.

To sum up. Our negative conclusions are, that neither the Celts nor their Druids built these stone circles, nor were they for sun or fire worship, and they were not the foundation either of dwellings or of dismantled mounds. Our positive results are, that the stone circles were built by pre-historic races-in this country, probably by the Picts; that they are connected with burial, though built independent of mounds and other forms of tomb; that they are also connected with ancestor worship, and that the whole difficulty resolves itself into the question of why they are of circular form and why the stones are set at intervals.

19TH MARCH 188 4.

The following were elected members on this date, viz.—Mr Francis Murray, Lentran; and Mr John Mackenzie, Greig Street, Inverness, ordinary; and Mr Ewen Cameron, 28 High Street, apprentice. Mr Duncan Campbell, Inverness, discoursed at some length on the Book of the Dean of Lismore.

26TH MARCH 1884.

On this date Mr Duncan Ross, Hilton, and Mr John Macleod, Myrtle Bank, Drummond, were elected ordinary members. Thereafter, Mr Alexander Macbain, M.A., Inverness, read the following paper on

THE ANCIENT CELTS.

(1) THEIR GENERAL HISTORY.

Three or four centuries before Christ, when the history of Western Europe is slowly emerging from obscurity, we find a people, named the Celts, in possession of the vast extent of territory that stretches from the Adriatic and Upper Danube to the Western Ocean, and embraces the British Isles. The northern boundary of the Celts was the Rhine and Mid-Germany, and they extended on the south as far as Central Spain, and the range of the Apennines in Italy. Contrary to the general tendency of early European nations to move westward, the Celts are then found to be already surging eastward, repelled by the impassable Atlantic; for, as Calgacus said to his Caledonians, there was now no land beyond-nothing save the waves and the rocks. Their history, till the second century before our era, presents little but a series of eastward eruptions-"tumults," the Romans called them, whereby over-populous districts were freed of their surplus population. Now and again they would pour through the passes of the Alps, and in a strong compact body make their way to Tuscany and Mid-Italy, striking terror into every Italian tribe, and into Rome as much as any of the rest. It is, indeed, with a great invasion of the Gauls that authentic Roman history begins, for the Gauls in 390 B.C. took and sacked the town of Rome itself, doubtless destroying all older records of its history. Another great invasion of the Gauls was made into Greece in 280 B.C., in which the temple of Delphi was taken and pillaged; and so compact and well arranged was this body of invaders that they passed

over to Asia Minor, overran it, and after various ups and downs settled finally, about 230 B.C., to the limits of the province of Galatia. These Gauls of Asia Minor are the people whom St Paul addressed in his epistle to the "Galatians." In later times they were called Gallo-Graecians, from their mixture with Greeks, but they appear to have preserved their language till the fourth century of our era, for St Jerome tells us their dialect was like that spoken by the Treviri of northern Gaul. Their customs and peculiarities of temperament, as we gather these from the historians and from St Paul, were thoroughly "Celtic." From the end of the third century before Christ, the history of the Celtic people is everywhere one of loss; the tide of invasion was then successfully turned against them. "They went to the war, but they always fell;" so sings the last of the Feni, the warrior bard who typifies the fate of his race. The Celts were excellent as invaders, though poor colonisers; but against invasion they were most unsuccessful. The centrifugal tendency so apparent in the race was not permitted to find scope in an enemy's country; but in their own country they could not, from mutual jealousy and selfishness, unite for any length of time against the invader. For instance, the Belgae, instead of keeping banded together against Cæsar, and unitedly repelling him, preferred to return each tribe to their own territories, and there await until he attacked some neighbouring tribe, when they intended to come to their assistance. "Seldom is it," says Tacitus, "that two or three states meet together to ward off the common danger. Thus, while they fight singly, all are conquered." After the first Punic war, the Romans made an effort to subdue their troublesome neighbours in the basin of the Po in North Italy. In the course of four years, from 225 to 222 B.C., the whole country was overrun and converted into a Roman province. But it was only after the second Punic war, and on the final conquest of the Boii in 191, that Gallia Cisalpina became a real Roman province. The Celts of Spain, known better as the Celtiberi-Celts and Iberians-were conquered during the second Punic war, but, being a brave and warlike people, they kept up rebellions, and defied Rome, until, with the fall of Numantia in B.C. 134, they were completely subdued. The Gauls of France were not attacked by the Romans until they had assured their power in the East, in Africa, and in Spain. In B.C. 125 the consul Fulvius Flaccus began the reduction of the Salluvii around Massilia, and in a few years they were subdued, and the Allobroges next attacked. The south of Gaul was by the year 118 B.C. made into a province. Matters, however, remained in this state till the

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