The Ely miner. [volume] (Ely, Minn.) 1895-1986, 1929-08-02

prepared by the National Geographic
Society. Washington. d. CT
II VEN in a continent rich to re-
- pletion with interest. Brittany,
IL the spout" of the French tea
pot" is remarkable for the
multiplicity of its appeal. One trav-
eler may be engrossed in its ethnol-
ogy; another is delighted by its archi-
lecture; third is charmed with its
medieval picturesqueness and quaint
costumes; a fourth shuts himself up
to dream over its history and romance,
while a fifth satisfies his soul to the
full with its eminent paintability.
In any of these seductions, of
course. the province may be matched
or outmatched by other countries !;
but it stands unriyaled as the land of
those strange megaliths-the grandes
pierres or monuments celtiques-
which a prehistoric race, people APP
parently of considerable civilization
and intense religious feeling, seem to
have striven financially toward self
expression and to have left, after all,
great but almost unintelligible cry.
That, perhaps. is the enduring emo
tiOn left with the visitor to the giant
dolmens and the vast alignments of
Morbihan These were the work of
men agonizing to the end that they
and their dead should never be for
gotten. And yet, vino were they, and
what is it they have tried so hard
to say?
Assyria, chronologically still more re-
mote from our era, is as an open book
through the almost miraculous recov-
scriptions; but these herculean toilers
of western Europe, transporting and
raising their huge boulder monuments
on the wild Breton moors, seem mere
shadows in the misT, unable, because
they left no written language, to speak
to us across the centuries.
And yet, through patience in in
vestigation and skill in Interpretation
amounting to genius, a few eager
workers, especially the little group
connected with the Musee Min, at
Carnac go miles west of Redon). have
begun to explain these monument
builders to us.
Nowhere in the world could spe-
cialist have found greater wealth of
this peculiar archeologic material than
lay around M. Zacharie lie Rouzic
and the man to whom he affection
ately refers as his regretted master,
Mr.. J. Miln," in Morbihan and Fin
istere.
Many Monuments About Carnac.
Almost every commune in Brittany
has one or two Celtic monuments
indeed, they are found, sometimes in
very fine examples, throughout west
ern France. But grouped about Car
nae, within a radius of seven miles,
there are nearly 300, even counting
the hundreds of menhirs in each of
the great alignments as single unit.
Minis results, gathered in the
museum bearing his name, have been
and are still being continuously ex-
tended and enriched by his successor,
and the following summary is based
largely on their deductions.
This region, it appears, was sort
of Mecca, or peculiarly holy ground.
to which the remains of heroes and
leaders were brought for entombment,
to which the faithful aocked in pill
grimages, and in which the great re-
ligious ceremonies were held.
Carnac was probably to the western
continent of Europe what Stonehenge
was to the British Isles. There is at
that place, in fact, focus and con-
centration of the megalithic works
left by the Celtic forerunners in their
prehistoric migration which, starting
in Asia, moved across northern Africa,
over Mediterranean waters into Spain,
and along the shores of the Atlantic,
the resting place of their god, the
sun. but ever baffied by the impossible
ocean, and so forced northward until
the effort died out in Scandinavia.
In their long sojourn near these
shores. covering at least 1000 years.
they became increasingly an agricul-
tural people. The weapons and i'm
plements placed in the sepulcher6 lose
their rough but serviceable character
and appear in polished but merely
yotive forms, often il soft or valu-
able stone. A few attempts at carv-
ing (as in the dolmen of the Table of
the Merchants and the tumulus of
Mane-er-H'roeck, at Locmariaquer)
have satisfied the most careful inves-
tigators that some use, at least. of
iron-or, at all events of metal-had
begun.
Most Important Types.
Nine types and several subtypes of
these monuments have been defined, of
which the most important are: the