tending to nothing more than the title denotes, "An Enquiry;" and that his views shall simply be taken for what they are worth.

He is not aware that the exact line of his research has been ever previously suggested.

The authorities are all given, that the reader may be enabled to weigh their value, and if any fresh light be thus thrown upon our obscure history, or any new field opened up for investigation, the author will rejoice that others should take up and follow out a subject on which his own limited leisure enables him only to throw out a few hints.

It is not a little striking, that while almost all remains of early British art and domestic architecture have perished from off the face of the earth, we should have left to us innumerable monuments of British aboriginal places of worship, and of their sepulchral rites, so closely connected with their religion.

The author was led to the present enquiry by what appeared to him the remarkable coincidence that the names by which the British tumuli, at the investigation of many of which he has assisted, are still popularly called for the most part by the titles, little if at all corrupted by the lapse of ages, of the divinities worshipped in the ancient mythologies of Canaan, Chaldæa, Babylonia, and Assyria, those cradles of the human race, such as we find them recorded in Scripture, and treated of at large in the interesting Essays and Notes on the Assyrian and Babylonian Pantheon appended to Rawlinson's translation of Herodotus.

Finding, therefore, a certain similarity of language

and of religion, the conclusion seemed inevitable that there must be also some ethnological affinity between peoples so circumstanced.

A further interest was created in the author's mind by finding that there was an identity between these deities and worship and those which are so repeatedly alluded to in the poems of Taliesin, Aneurin, and other Cambro-British poets; so that whatever discredit may have been thrown upon the genuineness and authenticity of the Welch poems, we find this striking fact, that the same mythological names pervade the British barrows, the Welch (Cambro-British) poetry, and the Babylonian and Assyrian Pantheon: and further, we find the same etymological and mythological roots attaching to the names of places, rivers, rocks, and mountains in Britain, and given apparently for the same causes as in the Eastern countries where they originated. It is remarkable in how many instances in places bearing these names we find traces of British earthworks, mounds, barrows, or camps; and where we find one or two of these Chaldæo-British names, we are very apt to find a cluster of them together, such as will be observed in Bisley, and Sevenhampton, and elsewhere, mentioned in the body of this work.

It is scarcely to be expected that amid so vast a multitude of names as those which the writer has thought well to bring forward in the body of the work and in the Appendices, he may not have been occasionally and perhaps frequently misled; but it seems hardly possible that such an immense concurrence of Oriental etymons could exist by mere accident,