Here then, methinks, we have at once a clue to the character of those Round Towers so frequent throughout the East, of whose history, however, the Orientals are as ignorant as we are here of our “rotundities.” Caucasus abounds in those columnar fanes, and it must not be forgotten that Caucasus has been claimed as the residence of our ancestors. On Teric banks, hard by, there is a very beautiful and lofty one as like as possible to some of ours. The door is described as twelve feet from the ground, level and rather oblong in its form. Lord Valentia was so struck with the extraordinary similitude observable between some very elegant ones which he noticed in Hindostan and those in this country, that he could not avoid at once making the comparison. The inhabitants, he observes, paid no sort of regard to those venerable remains, but pilgrims from afar, and chiefly from Jynagaur, adhering to _their old religion_, used annually to resort to them as the shrines of their ancient worship. Yet in the ceremonies there performed we see no evidence of their appropriation to the sacred fire--however _tradition_ may have ascribed them as once belonging to the Ghebres! Franklin mentions some he has seen at Nandukan, as do other writers in other sites. In short, all through the East they are to be met with, and yet all about them is obscurity, doubt, and mystery, a proof at once of the antiquity of their date, and of their not being receptacles for fire, which, _if the fact_, could be _there_ no secret. Yes, I verily believe, and I will as substantially establish, that they were, what has already been affirmed, in reference to those in Ireland, viz. temples in honour of the sun and moon, the procreative causes of general fecundity, comprising in certain instances, like them, also the additional and blended purposes of funeral cemeteries and astronomical observatories. The Septuagint interpreters well understood their nature when rendering the “high place of Baal”[86] by the Greek στηλη του βααλ, or Pillar of Baal, that is, the pillar consecrated to the sun; while the ancient Irish themselves, following in the same train, designated those structures Bail-toir, that is, the tower of Baal, or the sun, and the priest who attended them, Aoi Bail-toir, or superintendent of Baal’s tower. Neither am I without apprehension but that the name “Ardmore,” which signifies “the great high place,” and where a splendid specimen of those Sabian edifices is still remaining, was in direct reference to that religious column; but this _en passant_.