"If the person so standing turns to his left hand, he will find a
groove in one of the 6-foot pillars from top to bottom, which (in
the lapse of so many ages, and swelled by the alternate heat and
moisture of two thousand years, has lost its shape) might have
contained in it a scale of degrees for measuring; and the stone
called the altar[3] would have answered to draw those diagrams on,
and this scale of degrees was well placed for use in such a case,
for one turning himself to the left, and his right hand holding a
compass, could apply it most conveniently. With all this apparatus
the motions of the heavenly bodies might have been accurately
marked and eclipses calculated, a knowledge of which, Caesar says,
they possessed in his time.
"Wood and Dr. Stukeley both make the inner oval to consist of
nineteen stones, answering to the ancient Metonic Cycle of nineteen
years, at the end of which the sun and the moon are in the same
relative situation as at the beginning, when indeed the same
almanack will do again.
"In my younger days I have visited Stonehenge by starlight, and
found, on applying my sight from the top of the 6-foot pillars of
the inner oval and looking at the high trilithons, I could mark the
places of the planets and the stars in the heavens, so as to
measure distances by the corners and angles of them.
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