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[p. 174] and Bohemia. So archaeologists, in their medieval dread of excommunication, have tried to explain vitrified forts in terms of terrestrial experience. We find in their insufficiencies the same old assimilating of all that could be assimilated, and disregard for the unassimilable, conventionalizing into the explanation that vitrified forts were made by prehistoric peoples who built vast fires--often remote from wood-supply--to melt externally, and to cement together, the stones of their constructions. But negativeness always: so within itself a science can never be homogeneous or unified or harmonious. So Miss Russel, in the Journal of the B.A.A., has pointed out that it is seldom that single stones, to say nothing of long walls, of large houses that are burned to the ground, are vitrified. If we pay a little attention to this subject, ourselves, before starting to write upon it, which is one of the ways of being more nearly real than oppositions so far encountered by us, we find: That the stones of these forts are vitrified in no reference to cementing them: that they are cemented here and there, in streaks, as if special blasts had struck, or played, upon them. Then one thinks of lightning? Once upon a time something melted, in streaks, the stones of forts on the tops of hills in Scotland, Ireland, Brittany, and Bohemia. Lightning selects the isolated and conspicuous. But some of the vitrified forts are not upon tops of hills: some are very inconspicuous: their walls too are vitrified in streaks. Something once had effect, similar to lightning, upon forts, mostly on hills, in Scotland, Ireland, Brittany, But upon hills, all over the rest of the world, are remains of forts that are not vitrified.