Note 5 — Chapter V · Megalithic Monuments.

To resume, dolmens, called Hünengräber in Germany, stazzona in Corsica, antas in Portugal, and stendos in Sweden, have all alike one large flat horizontal slab placed on two or more upright unhewn stones. This is the one fixed rule; local circumstances, perhaps even the caprice of the builders, decided the position and the mode of erection. Often, as I have already remarked, dolmens are buried beneath tumuli, but exceptions to this are numerous. General Faidherbe, after having examined more than six thousand dolmens in Algeria, affirms that the greater number have never been covered with earth.5 In the Orkney Islands there are more than one hundred dolmens without tumuli, and Martinet failed to find any trace of mounds in Berry. In Scotland and Brittany we find dolmens buried, not beneath mounds of earth, but under accumulations of pebbles, called cairns in Scotland and galgals in Brittany. However minor details may vary, and they do vary infinitely, one main idea everywhere dominated the builders, and that was the desire to protect from all profanation the resting-place of what had once been a human being.