Although bigotry and materialism have suppressed facts, stifled testimony, misrepresented witnesses, and destroyed or perverted documents, the prehistoric fairy faith was happily too deeply graven thus to be obliterated, and it is only a matter of time and study to reconstruct it. Most of the suggestions I venture to put forward are sufficiently documented by hard facts, but some are necessarily based upon "hints and equivocal survivals".[38] At the threshold of an essay of the present character one can hardly do better than appropriate the words of Edmund Spenser:--I do gather a likelihood of truth not certainly affirming anything, but by conferring of times, language, monuments, and such like, I do hunt out a probability of things which I leave to your judgment to believe or refuse. FOOTNOTES: [1] Dent, 1909. [2] _The Lost Language of Symbolism_: An inquiry into the origin of certain letters, words, names, fairy-tales, folklore, and mythologies. 2 vols. London, 1912 (Williams & Norgate). [3] _Manchester Guardian_, 23rd December, 1912. [4] _Sonia._ [5] "Topographical comment--I will not say criticism--has been equally inefficient. A theory is not refuted by saying 'all the great antiquarians are against you,' 'the Psalter of Tara refutes that,' or 'O'Donovan has set the question past all doubt'. These remarks only prove that we have hardly commenced scientific archæology in this country."--Westropp, Thos. J., _Proc. of Royal Irish Acad._, vol. xxxiv., C., No. 8, p. 129. [6] We found precisely the same things as were found by our predecessors, remains of extinct animals in the cave earth, and with them flint implements in considerable numbers. You want, of course, to know how the scientific world received these latter discoveries. They simply scouted them. They told us that our statements were impossible, and we simply responded with the remark that we had not said that they were possible, only that they were true.--Pengally, W., _Kent's Cavern. Its Testimony to the Antiquity of Man_, p. 12. [7] Lubbock, J., _Prehistoric Times_. [8] In the course of his criticism the same writer pertinently observes:--