rs since. Nothing is known with certainty respecting the date of this
vast collection. Some conjecture that the remains here deposited are the
consequence of a sanguinary battle in very early times, and profess to
discover peculiarities in the osseous structure, showing a large
proportion of the deceased to have been natives of a distant land; that
all were in the prime of life; and that most of the skulls are
fractured, as though with deadly weapons. Others, again, say they are
the remains of the slain at Naseby.

"I have examined carefully and at leisure the crania, and can
discover none but the mesobreginate skulls common to these
islands.... I have discovered more than one skull, in which the
alveolar sockets were entirely absorbed,--an effect of age
rarely produced under eighty years, I should imagine. And as to
the marks of injury visible on some, they will be attributed, I
think, by the impartial observer, rather to the spade and foot
of the sexton, than the battle-axe and stout arm of the ancient
Briton."

As to the supposition that these relics were brought from Naseby, it is
sufficient to observe that the number of the slain in that engagement
did not exceed one thousand.

"That most of these bodies were lying in the earth for a number
of years is proved, I think, by these several circumstances:
First, a careful examination of the interior of many of the
skulls, shows that roots have vegetated within them, the dry
fibres of which I have often observed; next, the teeth are
nearly all absent, and it is notoriously one of the first
effects of inhumation upon the osseous system, by which the
teeth are loosened; and lastly, we have two sources from which
bodies may have been exhumed and reinterred beneath the mother
church; and those are the Chapel of the Virgin and that moiety
of the original graveyard, which has evidently at some long
distant time, been taken from the church."

Human bones have been dug up in front of Jesus Hospital, to the
south-east of the church-yard. At the eastern extremity of the cavern is
a rude sketch apparently intended to represent the Resurrection.

ARUN.

_Tace Latin for a Candle_ (Vol. i., p. 385).--I am not aware of "Tace is
Latin for a candle" in any earlier book than Swift's _Polite
Conversation_; but it must have been threadbare in his time, or he would
not have inserted it in that g