apathy mischief is done that can never be mended; and unless the damaging of national monuments, even though they should stand on private ground, is made a misdemeanor, we doubt whether, two hundred years hence, any enterprising explorer would be as fortunate as Mr. Layard and Sir H. Rawlinson have been in Babylon and Nineveh, and whether one single cromlech would be left for him to carry away to the National Museum of the Maoris. It is curious that the willful damage done to Logan Stones, once in the time of Cromwell by Shrubsall, and more recently by Lieutenant Goldsmith, should have raised such indignation, while acts of Vandalism, committed against real antiquities, are allowed to pass unnoticed. Mr. Scawen, in speaking of the mischief done by strangers in Cornwall, says:— “Here, too, we may add, what wrong another sort of strangers has done to us, especially in the civil wars, and in particular by destroying of Mincamber, a famous monument, being a rock of infinite weight, which, as a burden, was laid upon other great stones, and yet so equally thereon poised up by Nature only, as a little child could instantly move it, but no one man or many remove it. This natural monument all travellers that came that way desired to behold; but in the time of Oliver’s usurpation, when all monumental things became despicable, one Shrubsall, one of Oliver’s heroes, then Governor of Pendennis, by labor and much ado, caused to be undermined and thrown down, to the great grief of the country; but to his own great glory, as he thought, doing it, as he said, with a small cane in his hand. I myself have heard him to boast of this act, being a prisoner then under him.” Mr. Scawen, however, does not tell us that this Shrubsall, in throwing down the Mincamber, _i.e._ the Mênamber, acted very like the old missionaries in felling the sacred oaks in Germany. Merlin, it was believed, had proclaimed that this stone should stand until England had no king; and as Cornwall was a stronghold of the Stuarts, the destruction of this loyal stone may have seemed a matter of wise policy. Even the foolish exploit of Lieutenant Goldsmith, in 1824, would seem to have had some kind of excuse. Dr. Borlase had asserted “that it was _morally_ impossible that any lever, or indeed force, however applied in a mechanical way, could remove the famous Logan rock at Trereen Dinas from its present position.” Ptolemy, the son of Hephæstion, had made a similar remark about the Gigoman rock,(58) stating that it might be stirred with the stalk of an asphodel, but could not be removed by any force. Lieutenant Goldsmith, living in an age of experimental philosophy, undertook the experiment, in order to show that it was _physically_ possible to overthrow the Logan; and he did it. He was, however, very properly punished for this unscientific experiment, and he had to replace the stone at his own expense.