Leslie quotes various authors and travellers who had personally witnessed the remains of many of these altars. "Chardin," he says, "in his travels in Media in the end of the seventeenth century describes circles of large stones that must have been brought a distance of six leagues to the place where he observed them. The tradition regarding these circles was, that councils were there held, each member of the assembly being seated on a separate stone."[23] In the Persian province of Fars, Sir William Ouseley observed a monolith ten or twelve feet high, surrounded by a fence of stones. This rude column had a cavity on the top. Similar instances--viz., of monoliths having a cavity in the top--existed among the primitive monuments of Scotland. In Kincardineshire, at Auchincorthie, there were five circles of stones. On the top of one of the stones which stood on the east side of the largest circle, there was a hollow three inches deep, along the bottom of which, and down the side of the stone, a channel was cut. Another of the stones in this group had a similar cavity and channel. Other examples of such artificial cavities in ancient British monuments could be pointed out.--(Gibson's Camden, vol. ii., p. 291.) The same traveller remarked a few old trees which grew near this column, and these he supposed to be the remains of a consecrated grove. One of the trees was thickly hung with rags, the native offerings of the inhabitants of the country. Trees with such garniture may commonly be observed in the Dekhan and other parts of India, and not long since might be seen in many places in Britain. The Monolith thus described, and adjacent to the grove, was called by an expression equivalent to "Stone of the Fire Temple." We know from Herodotus that the ancient Persians, like their expatriated descendants the Parsees, were worshippers of the sun and fire, and the mysterious rites of the heathen inhabitants of Britain must have closely resembled those of the Persians, when the similarity induced Pliny to remark that Britain cultivates magic with ceremonial so august that it might be supposed that the art was first communicated from them to the people of Persia. Turning to Herodotus as here suggested, speaking of the order given by Cambyses to burn the corpse of Amasis, after his people had failed to tear it apart, owing to its having been embalmed, the historian says:--"This was truly an impious command to give, for the Persians hold fire to be a god, and never by any chance burn their dead. Indeed this practice is unlawful, both with them and with the Egyptians--with them for the reason above mentioned, since they deem it wrong to give the corpse of a man to a god; and with the Egyptians, because they believe fire to be a live animal, which eats whatever it can seize, and then glutted with the food, dies with the matter it feeds upon."[24]