Excerpt from The Dolmens of Ireland, Vol. 1 of 3: Their Distribution, Structural Characteristics, and Affinities in Other Countries, Together With the Folk-Lore Attaching to Them, Supplemented by Considerations on the Anthropology, Ethnology, and Traditions of the Irish People, With Four Maps, and EightBrought up from childhood in my dearly loved county of Cornwall, where - and nowhere more so - the love of the natale so/zmz is the predominant inspiration of life, surrounded on all sides, as soon as my rambles took me beyond the range of cultiva tion, by the monuments of a prehistoric past, many of which lay on my father's estate, and prompted to interest myself specially in them by the fact that I had before me, not only the example, but the actual ms. Collections of my great-great-grandfather, Dr. Borlase, whose book, the Antiquities of Cornwall, is a classic amongst works on Archaeology, it was no wonder that the interest of my life - and, without an interest, of what value would life be P - centred itself on the elucidation of a subject to which I seemed to be by nature called.While yet at Oxford 1 commenced the exploration of the tumuli and hut-villages in the western portion of my county, and it was while still at Trinity that a conversation with my kind friend, Professor Max Muller, showed me the necessity of extend ing my researches to Ireland, the prehistoric antiquities of which country are a counterpart of those of Cornwall, and filled me with a desire so to do. If, he said to me, you really intend to go deeply into the question of Celtic antiquities, it is to Ireland you must go.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.