Of a number of the smaller sized urns or vessels found in the barrows of Salisbury Plain, “a very large proportion are pierced on one side with two holes, from half an inch to two inches apart. There are exceptions with a large number of holes, but the rule is to have two holes on one side only,” says Mr. Long, in his “Stonehenge and its Barrows.” He proceeds to discuss their signification. The holes could not have existed for suspension, and he adopts Sir C. Colt Hoare’s supposition that the perforated urns were incense vessels. But calcined bones have been found in some, and others probably served as caps to the cinerary urns. Almost certainly the people of the barrows knew nothing of incense, and the probability is that these two holes were bored as doors of egress and ingress for the spirit that still tenanted the bones. Count d’Alviella says in his Hibbert Lectures for 1891, “Numbers of savage peoples suppose that the soul continues to inhabit the body after death, though from time to time it makes excursions into the world of the living. It therefore requires a hole if it is to escape from the enclosure. For this reason it is that, at the death of a relative, the Hottentots, the Samoyeds, the Siamese, the Fijians, and the Redskins, make a hole in the hut to allow the passage of the deceased, but close it again immediately afterwards to prevent its coming back. The Iroquois make a small hole in every tomb, and expressly declare that it is to enable the soul to go out and come in at its pleasure.” There was another usage of the men of the megalithic monuments which had, apparently, the same idea or conception of spirit as that which induced them to make holes in their dolmens. In 1873, when the French Association for the Advancement of Science met in Congress at Lyons, Dr. Prunières produced an elliptical disc of skull which had been found by him inside a human skull that had been trepanned, and which came from a dolmen in Lozère. The disc had been cut out of a human skull by some sharp instrument at an incline. At first sight it appeared probable that this piece came from the skull in which it was discovered, but on close examination it was found that it would not fit the hole trepanned in the skull. In the same dolmen Dr. Prunières found a second skull that had been trepanned more than once. Attention was now drawn to this remarkable phenomenon--and instances multiplied to prove that the men of the polished stone age, the men who erected Stonehenge and Carnac, were wont to cut holes in their heads. [Illustration: _Fig. 50._--SKULL THAT HAD BEEN TWICE TREPANNED FROM A CAVE IN THE PETIT-MORIN.]