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^rrhmtojgia €mhnnm. FOURTH SERIES.—No. XXIV. OCTOBER, 1875. ON PILLAR-STONES IN WALES. It is but a short time since writers divided the ancient pillar-stone, generally known as maen hir or menhir, into more than one class. Thus a monument of this kind might be either a funeral memorial, or an object of worship, or a boundary stone, or commemorative of some particular event, such as a battle. It is, indeed, probable that such stones may have served various pur¬ poses ; but it does not follow that they were not origin¬ ally intended for only one, namely, simply as comme¬ morative stones, marking that some event had occurred on that particular spot. The earliest recorded erection of such a stone occurs, as is well known, in the book of Genesis, when Jacob erected the stone in Bethel, in com¬ memoration of his dream. The pouring oil on it, how¬ ever, invested it with something more than the character of a purely commemorative stone, and hence according to some arose the heathen worship of anointed stones. Whether Moses' command about stone images, given in Leviticus xxvi, 1, refers to the same kind of worship is uncertain; but at any rate it furnishes an additional proof how wide and how early the practice had existed. Long before the councils of Aries and Tours, the earlier Christian writers, as Minutius Felix, Arnobius, and Clemens of Alexandria, speak of the common practice of anointing stones, and which were held in such reve- 4th ser., voii. vi. 21