do they communicate with them (though the recent excavations of archaeologists have thus connected whole groups of Dene Holes).  Many theories have been elaborated to account for their existence, but the data are conclusive against their having been either habitations, tombs, store-rooms, or hiding-places; and, in 1898, Mr. Charles Dawson, F.S.A., pointed out that, in Sussex, chalk and limestone are still quarried by means of identically such pits.  The chalk so procured is found a far more efficacious dressing for the soil than that which occurs on the surface, and moreover is more cheaply got than by carting from even a mile’s distance.  At the present day, as soon as a pit is exhausted (that is as soon as the diggers dare make their chambers no larger for fear of a downfall), another is sunk hard by, and the first filled up with the debris from the second.  In the case of the Dene Holes, this debris must have been required for some other purpose; and to this fact alone we owe their preservation.  It is probable that the celebrated cave at Royston in Hertfordshire was originally dug for this purpose, though afterwards used as a hermitage.

E. 4.—­Pytheas is also our authority for saying that bee-keeping was known to the Britons of his day;[25] a drink made of wheat and honey being one of their intoxicants.  This method of preparing mead (or metheglin) is current to this day among our peasantry.  Another drink was made from barley, and this, he tells us, they called [Greek:  koyrmi], the word still used in Erse for beer, under the form cuirm.  Dioscorides the physician, who records this (and who may perhaps have tried our national beverage, as he lived shortly after the Claudian conquest of Britain), pronounces it “head-achy, unwholesome, and injurious to the nerves”:  [[Greek:  kephalalges esti kai kakhochymon, kai tou neurou blaptikon]].

E. 5.—­Not all the tribes of Britain, however, were at this level of civilization.  Threshing in barns was only practised by those highest in development, the true Britons of the south and east.  The Gaelic tribes beyond them, so far as they were agricultural at all, stored the newly-plucked ears of corn in their underground dwellings, day by day taking out and dressing [[Greek:  katergazomenous]] what was needed for each meal.  The method here referred to is doubtless that described as still in use at the end of the 17th century in the Hebrides.[26] “A woman, sitting down, takes a handful of corn, holding it by the stalks in her left hand, and then sets fire to the ears, which are presently in a flame.  She has a stick in her right hand, which she manages very dexterously, beating off the grains at the very instant when the husk is quite burnt....  The corn may be thus dressed, winnowed, ground, and baked, within an hour of reaping.”