The sacred enclosures of stones which I have described have been compared to the alignments of stones at Carnac in Brittany and Merivale on Dartmoor, and it has been suggested that in the olden time these ancient European monuments may have witnessed religious rites like those which were till lately performed in the rude open-air temples of Fiji.[699] If there is any truth in the suggestion, which I mention for what it is worth, it would furnish another argument in favour of the view that our European cromlechs and other megalithic monuments were erected specially for the worship of the dead. The mortuary character of Stonehenge, for example, is at least suggested by the burial mounds which cluster thick around and within sight of it; about three hundred such tombs have been counted within a radius of three miles, while the rest of the country in the neighbourhood is comparatively free from them.[700]
Footnote 678:[ (return) ]
Th. Williams, Fiji and the Fijians, Second Edition (London, 1860), i. 242 sq.
Footnote 679:[ (return) ]
Charles Wilkes, Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition, New Edition (New York, 1851), iii. 86.
Footnote 680:[ (return) ]
John Jackson's Narrative, in Capt. J. E. Erskine's Journal of a Cruise among the Islands of the Western Pacific (London, 1853), pp. 475-477. The narrator, John Jackson, was an English seaman who resided alone among the Fijians for nearly two years and learned their language.
Footnote 681:[ (return) ]
Ch. Wilkes, op. cit. iii. 96.
Footnote 682:[ (return) ]
United States Exploring Expedition, Ethnology and Philology, by H. Hale (Philadelphia, 1846), p. 65. Compare Capt. J. E. Erskine, op. cit. p. 248: "It would also seem that a belief in the resurrection of the body, in the exact condition in which it leaves the world, is one of the causes that induce, in many instances, a desire for death in the vigour of manhood, rather than in the decrepitude of old age"; Th. Williams, op. cit. i. 183: "The heathen notion is, that, as they die, such will their condition be in another world; hence their desire to escape extreme infirmity."
Footnote 683:[ (return) ]
Ch. Wilkes, op. cit. iii. 94 sq. Compare Th. Williams, Fiji and the Fijians, i. 183-186; Lorimer Fison, Tales from Old Fiji (London, 1904), pp. xxv. sq.
Footnote 684:[ (return) ]
Ch. Wilkes, op. cit. iii. 96. Compare Th. Williams, op. cit. i. 188 sq., 193 sqq., 200-202; Lorimer Fison, op. cit. pp. xxv. sq.
Footnote 685:[ (return) ]
Th. Williams, op. cit. i. 200.
Footnote 686:[ (return) ]
Th. Williams, op. cit. i. 189; Lorimer Fison, op. cit. p. xvi.