The vitality and progress of archaeology so greatly depend on museums for systematic records, for the collation of objects, and for a storehouse of authority, that it seems worth while to review the general situation, and to trace the gradual emergence of objectives, which are now so clear-cut in aim and so exhaustive in scope as to justify us in believing that the museum ideal has at length been defined and stabilized. It is true that the field of activity has been much curtailed since what was first called the Home of the Muses was established by the Ptolemies at Alexandria. The Mouseion was more grandiose in scale and more liberal in its appeal than anything of later date, for not only did it comprise a theatre and banqueting-hall, a botanical garden and a menagerie, but it was a university and the centre from which radiated the whole intellectual life of a vast region. It was perhaps a little disdainful of the past, differing in this respect from the outlook of our own times, and yet in many ways our modern methods are modelled upon Alexandria far more than upon the direct but more recent ancestors of our museums, only dating back two and three hundred years. These were miscellaneous assemblages of bric-à-brac, of which the Tradescant Collection was a fair sample, containing many curiosities of nature to which fabulous properties were ascribed. The Royal Society possessed a bone from the skull of a mermaid. The horn of the unicorn was valued at a tremendous price. Mummies could always be sold to advantage, for when ground into powder their medicinal merits were great. Quack remedies as well as superstition and witchcraft appear to have influenced the collector, though of course in certain branches the enterprise of the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries differed but little from our own. The accumulation of coins and medals was for obvious reasons one of the most popular and widespread types of collection; arms and armour were gathered at every Court.

Although in the work of conservation and reconstitution of upper stories new lines have been recently struck out at Pompeii, at Ostia, and elsewhere, it may be fairly said that they have followed the example already set on the site of Knossos, where the work has now proceeded with successively improving methods for twenty-six years.

The examination of nearly 10,000 coins from the surface layer of Richborough, and the provisional classification of some 5,000 more, make it possible to draw some definite conclusions from them. All the coins I have dealt with in this paper were obtained from the top three feet of soil in the excavations carried out within the Fort under the direction of Mr. J. P. Bushe-Fox.

The following notes have been set down in response to the invitation contained in a foot-note to page 15 of Mr. Chas. H. Ashdown's excellent History of the Company, in the hope that they will prove of interest to those who are anxious that all details in connexion with one of the most interesting of medieval crafts shall be recorded.

The lower Thames, both below and more especially above the City of London, has yielded some hundreds of relics of the Bronze Age. In a few cases these may indicate the site of a ford, and at one point—Sion Reach—the association of exotic types suggests a local settlement of a somewhat special character. But for the most part these river-finds are of mixed type and period, and can only be referred to the general use of the river as a highway. They throw little or no light, incidentally, upon the vexed question of the origins of London.

The small town of Eye in north central Suffolk was one of those feudal centres which sprang into great importance on the redistribution of English lands following the Norman Conquest. It had, however, a previous history as head of an Honour, being held as such in the reign of Edward the Confessor by Edric the king's falconer, and was thus chosen as a suitable site for the establishment of one of the Conqueror's prominent barons, and granted to William Malet. This man was Sire de Graville, a small town a little east of Havre in Normandy, where the priory church founded by his grandson William, and some remains on the site of the Malet castle, still exist on a height overlooking the Seine. He was apparently of English birth on the maternal side and of very high family, his mother being a sister of the famous Godiva, wife of Leofric Earl of Mercia, and was thus one of those Normans who had definite pre-Conquest connexions with Saxon England.