The explorers of 1884 and 1887 did their work in a most praiseworthy manner. At the bottoms of shafts that had remained open there was naturally a good deal of débris, by sifting which they secured sundry bones and pieces of pottery. But the potsherds, examined by experts, told no story, and the bones, submitted to naturalists of high authority, were shown to be such that they might have belonged to animals of the last century. There are no marks of fire. There are no niches to point to a use for storing sepulchral urns; the chalk is singularly sterile of flints, so there is no likelihood that here, as at Brandon, the shafts were sunk for flints. In any case the symmetrical shape and the unity of design would negative that theory. The case is one for pure, but not therefore of necessity unprofitable, speculation. King Cunobelin's Gold Mines, as gold mines, may be discarded. Neither he or anybody else has yet found, in chalk and placed there by the process of nature, gold, or anything more like gold than pyrites, although a Press-man, greatly daring, "interviewed" Sir William Ramsay not long since on the presence of gold in sea-water. The putative ancestor of "Old King Cole" may have stored some of his gold there, for our rude forefathers had considerable store of gold; and the tradition may have crystallized into the phrase "King Cunobelin's Gold Mines." It is not likely that any men in the twentieth century will spend money in searching for gold in chalk. Still, in the days of the South Sea Bubble they were foolish enough for that, and the legend of King Cunobelin induced them to try these very excavations. The suggestion has also been made that these were granaries, similar to some used on the Continent in days gone by; but again the elaborate shape is a difficulty although the separation of the groups is not.