[My Life as an Author by Martin Farquhar Tupper]@TWC D-Link bookMy Life as an Author CHAPTER III 7/23
As their bones (known by their hollowness) often occur in the coprolites or fossil dung of Plesiosauri, mighty monsters of the deep like gigantic swans, it is thought they were their special prey, for which the long and flexible neck of the Plesiosaurus is an _a priori_ argument," &c.
&c. The 1833 journal is Welsh; and, _inter alia_, I therein drew and I now record that recently destroyed and more recently restored Druidical movement, the Buckstone: "A solid mass of rock, not of living adamant but of dead pudding-stone, seemingly 'by subtle magic poised' on the brow of a steep and high hill, wooded with oaks: the top of this mass of rock is an area of fifty-four feet, its base being four, and the height twelve.
It was once a logan stone, but now has no rocking properties; though most perilously poised on the side of a slope, and certainly, if in part a work of nature, it must have been helped by art, seeing the mere action of the atmosphere never could have so exactly chiselled away all but the centre of gravity.
The secret of the Druids, in this instance at least, was in leaving a large mass behind, which as a lever counteracted the preponderance of the rock." I drew on the spot two exact views of it, taken to scale,--whereof this is one,--now of some curious value, since its intentional destruction last year by a snobbish party of mischievous idiots.
(However, I see by the papers that, at a cost of L500, it has been replaced.) Let this touch suffice as to my then growing predilection for Druidism, since expanded by me into several essays find pamphlets, touching on that strange topic, the numerous rude stone monuments from Arabia to Mona. [Illustration] The 1834 journal regards Scotland,--a country I have since visited several times, including the Orkneys and Shetlands, and the voyage round from Thurso _via_ Cape Wrath to the Hebrides; whereof, perhaps, more anon.
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