If such considerations as these help us to connect Egyptian with British worships we may hope that they will be no less useful when we go further afield. I gather from a study of Mr. Maudslay’s admirable plans of Palenque and Chichén-Itzá that the solstitial and farmers’ years’ worships were provided for there. How did these worships and associated temples with naos and sphinxes[4] get from Egypt to Yucatan? The more we know of ancient travel the more we are convinced that it was coastwise, that is, from one point of visible land to the next. Are the cults as old as differences in the coast-lines which would most easily explain their wide distribution? [3] In Babylonia the spring equinox was the critical time of the year because the Tigris and Euphrates then began to rise. [4] See _Dawn of Astronomy_, Plate facing p. 182, for the lines of sphinxes at Karnak. CHAPTER V CONDITIONS AND TRADITIONS AT STONEHENGE After Mr. Penrose, by his admirable observations in Greece, had shown that the orientation theory accounted as satisfactorily for the directions in which the chief temples in Greece had been built as I had shown it did for some in Egypt, it seemed important to apply the same methods of inquiry with all available accuracy to some example, at all events, of the various stone circles in Britain which have so far escaped destruction. Many attempts had been previously made to secure data, but the instruments and methods employed did not seem to be sufficient. Much time has, indeed, been lost in the investigation of a great many of these circles, for the reason that in many cases the relations of the monuments to the chief points of the horizon have not been considered; and when they were, the observations were made only with reference to the magnetic north, which is different at different places, and besides is always varying; few indeed have tried to get at the astronomical conditions of the problem. The first, I think, was Mr. Jonathan Otley, who in 1849 showed the “Orientation” of the Keswick Circle “according to the solar meridian,” giving true solar bearings throughout the year. I wrote a good deal in _Nature_[5] on sun and star temples in 1891, and Mr. Lewis the next year expressed the opinion that the British Stone Monuments, or some of them, were sun and star temples. Mr. Magnus Spence of Deerness in Orkney published a pamphlet, “Standing Stones and Maeshowe of Stenness,[6]” in 1894; it is a reprint of an article in the _Scottish Review_, Oct. 1893. Mr. Cursiter, F.S.A., of Kirkwall, in a letter to me dated 15 March 1894, a letter suggested by my _Dawn of Astronomy_ which appeared in that year and in which the articles which had appeared in _Nature_ in 1891 had been expanded, drew my attention to the pamphlet; the observations had no pretension to scientific accuracy, and although some of the sight-lines were incorrectly shown in an accompanying map, May year and solstitial alignments were indicated.