Rude Stone Monuments in All Countries: Their Age and UsesFergusson, James
History
Rude Stone Monuments in All Countries: Their Age and Uses
Fergusson, James
Megalithic monuments
It is only in very recent times that the French have turned their
attention to the study of their Rude-Stone Monuments; but since they
have done so, it has been in so systematic and scientific a manner
that, had it been continued a few years longer, little would have been
left to be desired by the students of that class of antiquities in
France. War and revolution, however, intervened just as the results of
these labours were about to be given to the world, and how long we may
now have to wait for them, no one can tell. The Musée de St.-Germain
was far from being complete in July last, and only the first parts of
the great 'Dictionnaire des Antiquités celtiques' had been published at
that time. We can now hardly hope that the necessary expenditure will
be continued which is indispensable to complete the former, and it is
difficult to foresee in what manner the materials collected for the
dictionary can now be utilised.
Even when much further advanced towards completion, it is hardly to
be expected that the museums of St.-Germain and Vannes can rival
the royal collections at Copenhagen; and if the French had confined
themselves only to collecting, they would not have advanced our
knowledge very much; but, while doing this, they have also gathered
statistical information, and have been mapping and describing, so that
our knowledge of their monuments is much more complete than of those
of the Danes. To borrow a simile from kindred sciences, it is as if
the Danes had attended exclusively to the mineralogy of the subject:
collecting specimens from all parts, and arranging them according to
their similarities or affinities, wholly irrespective of the localities
from which they came. The French, on the other hand, have founded a
science similar to that of geology on their knowledge of the minerals;
they have carefully noted the distribution of the various classes
of monuments, and, so far as possible, ascertained their relative
superposition. The first is, no doubt, a most useful process, and one
that must to a certain extent precede the other; but unless we map the
various rocks on the surface and ascertain their stratification, it
hardly helps us in studying the formation or history of our globe.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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