The numerous stone monuments that are to be found scattered over this country, and over the neighbouring parts of Normandy, have given rise to many controversies as to their origin and use. By some they have been supposed to be mere sepulchral monuments erected in late times since the Roman occupation of Great Britain. Such an idea has little to rest upon, and we prefer to regard them, as they have always been regarded, as relics of the Druidical worship of the Celtic or Gaulish races that preceded us in this part of Europe. If we were to believe the accounts of ordinary historians, we might believe that the Druids were nothing more than a kind of savage race, hidden, like the fallow-deer in the recesses of their woods. Thought to be sanguinary, brutal, superstitious, we have learned nothing of them beyond their human sacrifices, their worship of the oak, their raised stones; without inquiring whether these characteristics which scandalize our tastes, are not simply the legacy of a primitive era, to which, by the side of the tattered religions of the old Paganism, Druidism remained faithful. Nevertheless the Druids were not without merit in the order of thought. For the Celts, as for all primitive people, astronomy and religion were intimately associated. They considered that the soul was eternal, and the stars were worlds successively inhabited by the spiritual emigrants. They considered that the stars were as much the abodes of human life as our own earth, and this image of the future life constituted their power and their grandeur. They repelled entirely the idea of the destruction of life, and preferred to see in the phenomena of death, a voyage to a region already peopled by friends. Under what form did Druidical science represent the universe? Their scientific contemplation of the heavens was at the same time a religious contemplation. It is therefore impossible to separate in our history their astronomical and theological heavens.