The lofty central area of Devon has ever presented a subject of fascination to geologists; and those evidences of early man which adorn Dartmoor to-day have similarly attracted antiquarian minds for many generations past. But the first-named student, although his researches plunge him into periods of mundane time inconceivably more remote than that with which the archaeologist is concerned, yet reaches conclusions more definite and arrives at a nearer approximation to truth than any who occupy themselves in the same area with manifold and mysterious indications of early humanity's sojourn. The granite upheaval during that awful revolt of matter represented by the creation of Dartmoor has been assigned to a period between the Carboniferous and Permian eras; but whether the womb of one colossal volcano or the product of a thousand lesser eruptions threw forth this granite monster, none may yet assert. Whether Dartmoor first appeared as a mighty shield, with one uprising spike in its midst, or as a target supporting many separate bosses cannot be declared; for the original aspect of the region has long vanished, though our worn and weathered land of tors still shadows, in its venerable desolation, those sublimer, more savage glories manifested ere the eye of man or beast existed to receive an image of them. But the earliest human problems presented by Devon's watershed admit of no sure solution, albeit they date from a time adjacent contrasted with that wherein the land was born. Nature's message still endures for man to read as his knowledge grows; but the records of our primal fellows have grown dim and uncertain as the centuries rolled over them. There exists, however, within the lofty, lonely kingdom of the granite, a chain of human evidences extending from prehistoric ages to the ruined shepherd's cot of yesterday. At many spots a spectator may perceive in one survey the stone ruin of the Danmonian's habitation, and hypaethral temple or forum, the heather-clad debris left by Elizabethan streamers of alluvial tin, the inky peat-ridges from which a moorman has just cut his winter firing. But the first-named objects, with kindred fragments that have similarly endured, chiefly fire imagination. Seen grey at gloaming time, golden through sunny dawns, partaking in those spectral transformations cast upon the moor by the movement of clouds, by the curtains of the rain, by the silver of breaking day, the monotone of night and the magic of the moon, these relics reveal themselves and stand as a link between the present and the far past. Mystery broods over them and the jealous wings of the ages hide a measure of their secret. Thus far these lonely rings of horrent stones and the alignments between them have concealed their story from modern man, and only in presence of the ancient pound, the foundations of a dwelling, the monolith that marked a stone-man's sepulchre, the robbed cairn and naked