MARCH 11TH, 1884.

Professor W. H. FLOWER, LL.D., F.R.S., President, in the Chair. The Minutes of the last meeting were read and signed.

The following presents were announced, and thanks voted to the respective donors:

FOR THE LIBRARY.

From the UNITED STATES GEOLOGICAL SURVEY.-Bulletin, No. 1. Second Annual Report, 1880-81. Monograph No. 2. Tertiary History of the Grand Cañon District, with Atlas.

From the UNITED STATES GEOLOGICAL AND GEOGRAPHICAL SURVEY OF THE TERRITORIES.-Twelfth Annual Report, 1878. Survey of the Territories of Wyoming and Idaho. 2 volumes, with Maps and Panoramas.

From the GERMAN ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY.-Correspondenz-Blatt. 1884, No. 3.

From the ACADEMY.-Atti della R. Accademia dei Lincei. Vol. VIII, Fas. V.

From the ASSOCIATION.-Journal of the East India Association. Vol. XVI, No. 2.

From the INSTITUTION.―Journal of the Royal Institution of Cornwall. Vol. VIII, Part I.

From the SOCIETY.-Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. Vol. LII, Part I, Nos. 3, 4.

Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society. March,
1884.

Mittheilungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft in Wien.
XIII Band., Heft. 3, 4.

Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archæology. Vol.
VIII, Parts 1, 2.

Bulletin de la Société d'Anthropologie de Bruxelles. Tom.
II, Fas. 1, 2.

From the EDITOR.-"Nature." Nos. 748, 749.

"Psyche." March, 1884.

Revue Politique et Littéraire. Tom. XXXIII, No. 10.
Revue Scientifique. Tom. XXXIII, Nos. 9, 10.
"Science." Nos. 55, 56.

The Science Monthly. No. 5.

The election of W. AYSHFORD SANFORD, Esq., was announced. Mr. W. J. KNOWLES read a paper " On the Antiquity of Man in Ireland," which was followed by a discussion in which the PRESIDENT, Mr. LEWIS, Mr. PARK HARRISON, Mr. ATKINSON, Mr. RUDLER, and Dr. GARSON took part.

The following paper was read by the author:

On the "LONGSTONE" and other PREHISTORIC REMAINS in the ISLE OF WIGHT.

By A. L. LEWIS, F.C.A., M.A.I.

THE Isle of Wight, the Roman remains in which have been recently described by our colleagues, Mr. F. G. H. Price, F.S.A., and Mr. J. E. Price, F.S.A., is not destitute of remains of an earlier period. Some of these, indeed, have been explored and described in our "Journal" by the gentlemen already named, but they were in the eastern half of the island,' whereas those to which I propose to draw your attention to-night are in its western half.

On the downs above Mottistone (a place on the high road to and five miles east of Freshwater) is a single upright stone called the "Longstone." It is about 13 feet high, 5 to 7 feet broad, and 4 feet thick; and 4 feet north-east from it lies a flat stone, 9 feet long, 4 feet broad, and 2 or more feet thick. These stones have been thought to be the remains of a dolmen, or cromlech, but I see no reason to suppose that any other stones were ever there, and I think that we still have the whole monument as it was originally designed, unless indeed the flat stone may have been shifted; the upright stone is too high to have been a supporter of a dolmen, and the flat stone is not long enough to have matched the upright one if set on end itself. Father Smiddy speaks of upright stones with flat stones by them, in Ireland, as having been judgment-seats of the Druids, but what his authority for that statement is I do not know. To the east of the "Longstone" is a fine tumulus, marked on the ordnance map as "Black Barrow," and to the north-east is a cleft in the Downs; the flat stone may have served as an altar on which the sun might shine through this cleft at its rising, or it may have been a judgment-seat, as Father Smiddy suggests, or the two stones may be simply a memorial, with or without interment. Colonel Godwin-Austen says of the stones erected by the Khasias (India) that upright stones represent the male element, and flat stones in front of them the female element."

A sandy lane leads from the high road up to these stones, and, in the channel formed by rain in the middle of this lane, I found a good core, a flint stone chipped all round and possibly used as a hammer, and two other fragments of worked flint.

"Journ. Anthrop. Inst.," vol. xii (1882), p. 192. 2 Ibid., vol. i (1871), p. 122.

Between two and three miles east-north-east from these stones, in the valleys between Galliberry, Idlecombe, Newbarn, and Rowborough Downs, are various earthworks, which are marked on the ordnance maps as "British villages." Our friend Mr. Flinders Petrie, who had previously visited and measured some of these works, hearing that I was in their vicinity, drew my special attention to them, saying that he believed them to be not villages but cattle-drives or game-traps; and, having examined them carefully, I think there can be no doubt that he is quite right. They consist of a series of banks running across the narrow deep valleys, and even partly up the hills on each side, so as to prevent their being turned, each bank having about the middle of its lower side a pit; one of these pits is more than 40 feet in diameter, which is too large for a pit dwelling. Three of these valleys converge towards one near Calbourne, where there is a rectangular double earthwork nearly obliterated, which, if of the same date, may have served as a pound in which to keep any animals taken alive; it seems too slight and too much commanded from the hills to have been a defensive work. What kind of animals, and in what numbers, must have existed to make it worth while to construct such works for their capture I do not know; but I suppose the system was for all the able-bodied inhabitants, canine as well as human, to turn out at intervals, and, having formed a cordon round a great part of the country, to drive all that it contained towards the select slaughterers concealed in the pits or behind the banks -a plan which, with some variations, used to be adopted by the natives of Australia.

On the high ground between Brixton and Cheverton Downs there is, however, a circular bank of a different description, about 6 feet high inside and 80 feet in diameter, without any ditch, but constructed with the earth taken from inside it, and this probably enclosed a few huts. I found no pits inside it, but the dwellings (if any) might not have been of the pit description. Although close by the trackway it is not seen till it is nearly reached, and there are tumuli very near it; at the foot of one about half-a-mile off, I picked up a worked flint which may have served as a fish-hook. This earthwork is about a mile and a half due east from the "Longstone."

The other fragments of worked flint exhibited were picked up on the surface in various parts of the neighbourhood. The bottom of a vessel, apparently Romano-British, I picked up on sloping ground above Puckaster Cove, Niton. Black says

landslips have exposed Romano-British pottery at Barnes, which is about six miles along the coast to the west, and this piece has probably been turned out in the same way. I could not

find any more, though I made some search; but even this may not be altogether valueless, as some antiquaries have endeavoured to identify Puckaster Cove with the Roman Portus Castrensis.

The following paper was read by the Director:

On the CROMLECH (Stone Circle) of ER-LANIC.
By Rear-Admiral F. S. TREMLETT, F.G.S.

[WITH PLATE III.]

THE island of Er-Lanic ("the little Lande"), which is also known by the name of Innis Tessier ("the Weavers' Island"), is small and uninhabited, and is situated among the rocks and rapid currents of the Archipelego of the Gulf of the Morbihan. It has a superficial area of rather less than two acres, and is situated to the south of Gavr' Innis; to the west of the Island of La Jument; to the east of the Ile Lonque, and to the north of the headland of Pen Bé ("Point of the Tomb "), in Arzon.

If

It is rather a difficult matter to land on this small island, and in reality it is very rarely visited, it being both uncultivated and uninhabited. Even the fishermen know it only from the fact of its being situated in close proximity to a dangerous reef of rocks, the Tisserands ("weavers "), which they avoid. they ever land there, it is simply to cut down and bring away a few ferns; but of these rare visitors very few have ever given themselves the trouble of walking round this insignificant island; this is why the remarkable megalithic monument which is situated on it remained so long undiscovered.

From the height of the remarkable tumulus on Gavr' Innis, Dr. de Closmadeuc, President of the Société Polymathique du Morbihan at Vannes, who has become its proprietor, observed what appeared to him to be a group of menhirs on this small island, which decided him to go over to it in his boat at low water. On landing, he was not long in discovering amongst the gorse and genet which grow so abundantly there, that he had before him one of those early monuments which are so rare, and so little known in Brittany, namely, a megalithic Cromlech, or circle of stones.

On the centre of this island there is a natural rocky eminence, to the south-east of which, and distant from it about 25 yards, and situated on that part which slopes towards Arzon, will be seen a cromlech (circle) which is continued down to the beach; it is composed of 60 menhirs, forming a circle of about 200 yards

in circumference; its diameter from east to west is about 65 yards, that from north to south is 58 yards. Some few of the menhirs composing this circle remain still upright, but the greater number of them have fallen, and lie concealed by the long grass and gorse bushes. The distance between them is so inconsiderable that they nearly touch each other; in fact, in some parts they somewhat resemble the flat tombstones of a cemetery. Only four of the menhirs remain upright: these are to be found on the north-western side of the circle; their medium height is about 10 feet, but one of the fallen ones is really colossal: it is broken in halves, and it measures 18 feet long, having a thickness of 6 feet.

A very singular fact is that only one-half of this circle is on the island, the other half being on the beach in consequence of the sea having encroached on the land on its south-western side. When the tide is up, this part of the monument is covered with water, and consequently the complete circle can only be seen at low water.

The discovery of this megalithic monument was first made by Dr. de Closmadeuc in 1866, but he frequently visited it afterwards for the purpose of studying it. On each visit he found within this cromlech a sufficient quantity of stone implements and shards of pottery to fill his baskets. These relics were of the following kinds :

First. An enormous quantity of shards of pottery, which in form and paste resembles that which has been found in the Celtic monuments in Brittany. The paste of some of it was coarse and black, it having been mixed with grains of silex, and badly fired; some of it had been carefully made. Its surface was red, and it had on it the usual ornamentation resembling that found on some of the urns from the dolmens. Numerous samples of the pottery from Er-Lanic are now in the cases of the Archæological Museum at St. Germains, near Paris.

Secondly. A very considerable quantity of worked flint instruments, consisting of long knives (or flakes), their forms being prismatic, triangular, and quadrangular; scrapers and sharp-pointed flint chips, nuclei and circular stone hammers, &c. The objects in flint were found by thousands, but only two flint arrow-heads were discovered.

Thirdly. Hundreds of celts or stone axes, of every shape and of various dimensions, were also found here. The greater part of them were of diorite, a few were of quartz, agate and fibrolite, but nearly every one of them had been broken.

Fourthly. Stone mortars and granite querns, being of the same patterns as those which have been found in the dolmens of the Morbihan. One of the mortars had been hollowed out