so remote that its occurrence can have but little bearing on the argument as to who built these Algerian monuments. But did they come by sea? Did the dolmen-building races embark from the ports of Palestine or those of Asia Minor? Were they in fact the far-famed Phoenicians, to whom antiquaries have been so fond of ascribing these structures. The first answer to this is that there are no dolmens in Phœnicia, and that they have not yet been found near Carthage, nor Utica, nor in Sicily, nor indeed anywhere where the Phœnicians had colonies. They are not even found at Marseilles, where they settled, though on the western bank of the Rhone, where they had no establishments, they are found in numbers. They may have traded with Cornwall, and discovered lands even farther north, but to assume that so small a people could have erected all the megalithic remains found in Scandinavia and the continent of France, and other countries where they never settled, perhaps never visited, is to ascribe great effects to causes so insignificant as to be wholly incommensurable. So wholly inadequate does the Phœnician power seem to have been to produce such effects, that the proposition would probably never have been brought forward had the extent of the dolmen region been known at the time it was suggested. Even putting the element of time aside, it is now clearly untenable, and if there is any truth in the date above assigned to this class of monuments, it is mere idleness to argue it.
The idea of a migration from France to Algeria is by no means so illogical. The French dolmens, so far as is now known, seem certainly older than the African—a fact which, if capable of proof, is fatal to the last suggestion—and if we assume that this class of monument was invented in western Europe, it only requires that the element of time should be suitable to establish this hypothesis. When the Celts of central Gaul, six centuries before the Christian era, began to extend their limits and to press upon those of the Aquitanians, did the latter flee from their oppressors to seek refuge in Africa, as at a latter period the dolmen-builders of Spain sought repose in the green island of the west? There certainly appears to be no great improbability that they may have done so to such an extent as to cause the adoption of this form of architecture after it had become prevalent elsewhere; and as the
