And now what shall we say more? The grand old temple pleads for itself. To assign to it the later origin would be to deprive it of its well-founded claim to take rank among the most interesting of all the relics of the ancient heathen world which have come down to us. Thus dishonoured, it would sink down into the comparatively insignificant monument of a treacherous slaughter said to have been perpetrated in the neighbourhood about A.D. 450. But can this be all the meaning there is in this mysterious structure, which has been viewed with astonishment and veneration by such numbers of persons through successive centuries? Only think of the time and labour—the almost superhuman efforts—which it must have cost our forefathers to convey these ponderous stones to the spot, and then to shape and to set them up. Such sustained exertion as this, so laborious and so costly, requires a motive to account for it. And there is no motive we know of so powerful as what may be termed “the religious instinct.” The force of this principle of human nature, even in its sadly corrupted state as it exists in the case of the ignorant and superstitious heathen, is nevertheless the strongest principle of action in the human breast. We see it in the tenacity with which heathen idolaters cling to their ancestral deities, or, as in India, in the enormous sums of money which have been lavished by the Hindoos on the construction and adornment of their idolatrous temples. Viewing Stonehenge, then, as a temple erected at a very early period for the worship of the Sun, or Baal, we have what may be regarded as an adequate motive for all the time and labour which must have been expended in its construction, while, on the other hand, such a sufficient motive seems to be altogether wanting on any other supposition. It may be added that the author of “Rude Stone Monuments,” while strenuously maintaining his own view, admits, with some degree of inconsistency, that “looking at the ground plan of Stonehenge there is something singularly _templar_ in its arrangements.” It is also worth noticing that the utter absence of anything like ornamentation in this building is itself a very strong argument against its Roman or post-Roman age. For we shall look in vain to find amongst the acknowledged remains of Roman architecture any example of such severe unadorned simplicity as we have here. May we not then be suffered to retain our old belief that this is unquestionably a relic of Pagan antiquity of surpassing interest, visibly testifying as it does amidst the solitude and silence of the surrounding plain to the state in which our Celtic or Belgic forefathers were before the light of Christian truth visited our shores, and brought with it the civilization, and other inestimable blessings, which we now happily possess. * * * * * * * * * * Bennett Brothers, Printers, Journal Office, Salisbury.