bones; a semicircle with three or four straight lines proceeding from it, but not touching it; a dot with several lines radiating from it; combinations of short straight lines arranged either at right angles to or sloping from a central line; an S-shaped curve, each loop inclosing concentric circles; and a vast number of other combinations of the circle, spiral, line, and dot, which can not be described in writing. Some of the ancient “Turf-Monuments” of England are to be classed as petroglyphs. The following extracts from the work of Rev. W. A. Plenderleath (_b_) give sufficient information on these curious pictures: Although all the White Horses, except one, are in Wiltshire, that one exception is the great sire and prototype of them all, which is at Uffington, just 2-1/2 miles outside the Wiltshire Boundary and within that of Berkshire. * * * The one mediæval document in which the White Horse is mentioned is a cartulary of the Abbey of Abingdon, which must have been written either in the reign of Henry II or soon after, and which runs as follows: “It was then customary amongst the English that any monks who wished might receive money or landed estates and both use and devolve them according to their pleasure. Hence two monks of the monastery at Abingdon, named Leofric and Godric Cild, appear to have obtained by inheritance manors situated upon the banks of the Thames; one of them, Godric, becoming possessed of Spersholt, near the place commonly known as the White Horse Hill, and the other that of Whitchurch, during the time that Aldhelm was abbot of this place.” This Aldhelm appears to have been abbot from 1072 to 1084, and from the terms in which the White Horse Hill is mentioned the name was evidently an old one at that time. Now it was only two hundred years before this time, viz, in 871, that a very famous victory had been gained by King Alfred over the Danes close to this very spot. “Four days after the battle of Reading,” says Asser, “King Æthelred, and Alfred, his brother, fought against the whole army of the pagans at Ashdown. * * * And the flower of the pagan youths were there slain, so that neither before nor since was ever such destruction known since the Saxons first gained Britain by their arms.” And it was in memory of this victory that, we are informed by local tradition, Alfred caused his men, the day after the battle, to cut out the White Horse, the standard of Hengist, on the hillside just under the castle. The name Hengist, or Hengst, itself means _Stone Horse_ in the ancient language of the Saxons, and Bishop Nicholson, in his “English Atlas,” goes so far as to suppose the names of Hengist and Horsa to have been not proper at all, but simply emblematical.