Plan {6} My hypothesis then is as follows: that our ingenious ancestors portrayed on the Wiltshire Downs, a Planetarium or stationary Orrery, if this anachronism may be allowed me, located on a meridianal line, extending north and south the distance of sixteen miles; that the planetary temples thus located, seven in number, will, if put into motion, be supposed to revolve around Silbury Hill as the centre of this grand astronomical scheme; that thus Saturn, the extreme planet to the south, would in his orbit describe a circle with a diameter {7} of thirty-two miles; that four of these planetary temples were constructed of stone, those of Venus, the Sun, the Moon, and Saturn; and the remaining three of earth, those of Mercury, Mars, and Jupiter, resembling the “Hill Altars” of Holy Scripture; that the Moon is represented as the satellite of the Sun, and, passing round him in a epicycle, is thus supposed to make her monthly revolution, while the Sun himself pursues his annual course in the first and nearest concentric orbit, and is thus successively surrounded by those also of the planets, Venus, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn; that these planetary temples were all located at due distances from each other; that the relative proportions of those distances correspond with those of the present received system; and that, in three instances, the sites of these temples bear in their names plain and indubitable record of their primitive dedication. Now, further, as to the four temples constructed of stone, I shall be able to shew that they consisted of a certain definite number of stones, and by an analysis of their details I shall shew, that these details are resolvable into every known astronomical cycle of antiquity, whilst the other appendages attached to, but not forming component parts of three of such temples, are resolvable only into numerical cycles; and that these planetary temples taken synthetically, and as a whole, were intended to represent the magnus annus, the great year of Plato, the cycle of cycles, (well known before the days of Plato, but he, being esteemed the Solomon of {8} his age, this most celebrated of all cycles took its name from him), when the planets, some revolving faster, some slower in their several courses, would simultaneously arrive at the several points from whence they originally started, and that then the old world would end, and a new world spring into being.