A Reflective mind can hardly look upon the present world without feeling considerable apprehension. The tumult and turmoil of the last decade still have their reactions, and progress towards stability and sanity is painfully slow. Nor is this all. The aims and ideals that seem to possess or obsess the minds of nearly all classes in these disturbing days are pitifully low and entirely wanting in dignity. All the countries of the world would seem to be infected with the same want of idealism, and the peoples to possess no ambition outside of sheer materialism. Our own country is in this respect not markedly different from others, though our racial temperament has considerable effect on its external manifestations. At no time in our past history have material conditions been so favourable as they now are, and this in spite of the deep reaching disturbances of recent years. And yet the cry, as much in England as elsewhere, is on all sides for yet further advantages on the material side, and hardly a voice is raised to point out that contentment of soul lies in another direction, and that in wealth alone no real satisfaction can be found. There is nothing of novelty in this statement, but I speak of it because never in my time has there been a demand so entirely unashamed and ignoring so completely the needs of man's spiritual and intellectual sides. The newspapers, the majority of them pitifully partisan, preach this same gospel of materialism, pointing this way or that in deference to their political colour, but sedulously ignoring all human demands except for food, clothing, and amusement. much from politicians, and truly one gets little.

The Reliquary of the True Cross which is preserved at Poitiers in the convent of Sainte-Croix is the earliest existing authentically dated object decorated with enamel in a Byzantine workshop. It has never before been reproduced in any accurate form, and no living expert has had the opportunity of examining it. Its history is complete and fully authenticated. The tale is worth brief recapitulation. It involves the doings of two eminent personages, St. Radegund and St. Fortunatus, the one distinguished as the first civilized and refined queen of France, the other still memorable as the last of the Roman poets.

The Early Christian ivory diptych which, by the permission of the owner, Mr. Andrews, it is my privilege to bring before the Society is almost entirely unknown. I have called it ‘undescribed’, and I might almost have called it ‘unpublished’. But some twenty years ago a rather inadequate photographic reproduction of it did appear in the first volume of Professor Venturi's invaluable Storia dell' Arte Italiana. Since that date a number of archaeologists have tried to get a sight of the diptych, but in vain. And the few brief notices of it that have been published by Professor Goldschmidt, Dom Leclercq, and others, have been based entirely on the small and not very clear half-tone block given without comment by Professor Venturi.

It was in the middle of the nineteenth century that the site of Ur was identified and the excavation of its ruins begun by G. E. Taylor, consul at Basra, acting on behalf of the British Museum. A number of antiquities was brought back to London, but the unsensational character of the finds in southern Mesopotamia caused them to be overshadowed by the striking discoveries then being made in the northern mounds, and work was abandoned, not to be resumed until the Great War put the British in temporary possession of the country and gave it a fresh interest in the eyes of the public. In the latter part of the war Mr. R. Campbell Thompson, working for the British Museum, made soundings at Ur, but did not carry out extensive excavations; in 1919 Dr. H. R. Hall was sent out by the Trustees and began a systematic investigation of the site, employing a considerable force of men for nearly three months, and obtaining important results. Dr. Hall's work made it evident that if the site of Ur was to be tackled seriously, a whole series of campaigns extending over many years and involving very heavy outlay would be required, campaigns to which the post-war finances of the British Museum were by no means adequate. Fortunately the Trustees were at this juncture able to join forces with the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania, and it was decided that an expedition should take the field at the joint expense of the two institutions, which should also share with the Iraq Government in the material results of the work. Of this joint expedition I was asked to take charge. Mr. F. G. Newton came as architect of the party, Mr. Sidney Smith of the British Museum dealt with the inscriptions, and at the end of the year we were joined by Mr. A. W. Lawrence. Hamoudi, my Carchemish foreman, was put in charge of the men; the actual labourers were the Muntafik Arabs of the district. Digging started at the beginning of November and went on without interruption, owing to an unusually clement winter, until halfway through February.

The manner of discovering the objects found was unusual, and their presence quite unlooked for. It was as follows. A carriage drive leading to a modern house was being repaired during the early days of January of the present year (1923). One of the men employed on the work brought up the neck of an earthenware pitcher on the point of his pick, which upon examination suggested Roman origin. The remainder of the pitcher was unearthed, and further investigations made. The ground was of stiff clay mixed with flints, and much blackened with an admixture of charcoal. Digging was difficult as the weather was very wet at the time and water flowed freely into the excavation.

South Kyme is a village in the Kesteven division of Lincolnshire, seven miles E.N.E. of Sleaford and eighteen miles south-east of Lincoln. The church is part of the south aisle and nave of a priory of Austin Canons founded before 1169. In the course of the erection of the modern chancel, some years ago, six carved stones were dug up on the site and were subsequently built into the structure of the north wall on the inside face of it. These stones are the subject of the present note, and the photograph and drawing made for me by Mr. P. J. Kipps give all the information to be obtained by an inspection of the stones themselves, until such time as they may be taken from the wall and their reverse sides examined.

The cylindrical box (pyxis) illustrated in the plates, now in private possession, belongs to a small class carved with pagan subjects; the majority of pyxides are Christian. When Graeven issued his series of photographs of antique carvings in ivory and bone about twenty years ago, the number of pagan examples only amounted to a dozen, with a few fragments, and two among them, those with Orpheus and the beasts, at Bobbio and Florence respectively (see below), are claimed by some authorities as Christian. Since that time the remains of another pagan box with Bacchic scenes have come to light, discovered in the chapel of the Sancta Sanctorum at the Lateran in 1903, and now preserved in the Vatican. There may have been further discoveries not brought to general notice; otherwise the present example is the first addition to the list since the third year of the present century.

My last report presented a year ago concluded with an account of the third excavation of the ditch outside the circular earthwork. A fourth excavation in continuation of the third was begun immediately afterwards and carried 26 ft. to the west. It was made 2 ft. wider, as the ditch here appeared to have been wider and deeper, but except for this there was no appreciable difference from former sections. The upper soil had been much disturbed by rabbits or persons digging them out, the burrows being occasionally found to be 4 ft. deep. The upper layer of humus, and the rubble layer beneath it, contained chips of the building of Stonehenge to the number of 570, but none was found lower than the junction with the silt. With the chips were four small worn pieces of Bronze Age pottery, 10 of the Roman Period, a small quartzite maul, about 60 animal bone fragments, and the greater part of a human ulna bone.

The inscription reproduced in the accompanying plate is cut on the abacus of the northern pier of the chancel arch in the little church of St. James at Clapton, set on the hill-side above Bourton-on-the-Water, Gloucestershire. Attention wasfirstcalled to it by the late Mr. Ulric Daubeny, who assigned the building to the last quarter of the twelfth century. The lettering is of the Early Gothic (popularly called ‘Lombardic’) type, which prevailed from about 1200 to 1350, and therefore the inscription is probably not older than the thirteenth century. But the forms of the letters are sometimes peculiar, if not unique; and they seem to have been produced partly by the use of compasses. Some letters (e.g. E and 1) are not always formed in exactly the same way; while others, as we shall see, appear to be minuscule forms, such as are found in manuscripts of the period. The whole gives the impression of being the work of an amateur rather than of a professional carver.

The beaker here illustrated is new only in the sense that it is now for the first time accessible. It was discovered some years before 1901 by a farm boy in a stone cist in the yard of Llancaiach Isaf, an old farm-house in the parish of Gellygaer, 12 miles north of Cardiff (O.S. 6 inch, Glamorgan XIX. S.E.). The cover-slab of the cist then, and until the present year, was level with the paving of the yard, and no traces of a mound survived. Within the cist were found the beaker, a skull, and, it is said, some ‘ornaments’, of which nothing is now known. The skull was seen by a local medical man, but was then, by order of the landowners, replaced with the beaker in the cist. From that time, according to the (then) tenant of the farm, the burial remained undisturbed until 25th June 1901, when a local resident, Mr. George Seaborne, who has greatly assisted my inquiries, reopened the cist and drew attention to it in the Western Mail newspaper (19th July 1901). The contents, however, were not removed, and the precise locality of the burial remained the close secret of one or two persons until the present year, when cist, beaker, and skull were removed to the National Museum of Wales.

As reported in the April 1922 number of the Antiquaries Journal, the ground to the north and north-west of the Roman Villa Museum contains the remains of a large Roman house, some pavements of which were discovered in 1881.

In our Proceedings xvi, 174, is an illustration of a bronze weight found at Grove Ferry, near Fordwich, Kent, and exhibited by Col. Copeland, who subsequently presented it to the British Museum. There is a description by bur present President, with references to other weights from Kentish graves of the sixth century, which were later studied by Mr. Fred. Seebohm; but it has recently been re-weighed, and its value found to be 576 troy (or barley) grains, not 575 grains. The difference is trifling, but enough to emphasize the fact that it is exactly one-tenth of the troy pound. On each face are 22 impressions of the same stamp, arranged in different ways, and therefore in this case probably ornamental. The decimal division of the pound is found in Republican Rome, but there the pound was 5760 and the ounce 576 wheat grains, four of which are equivalent to three barley or troy grains. However, I can find no evidence that the above hint has ever been taken in order to explain the weight-system of our pagan forefathers in England. For this purpose let it be supposed that the troy pound, which is not named before the fifteenth century, was divided in two ways. In the tables G stands for grammes of 154 grains, and an asterisk distinguishes weights that exactly agree with the standard.

The late Bronze Age founder's hoard, which I have the honour of exhibiting, was found during excavations at the ‘Wandsworth Works’ of the Wandsworth, Wimbledon, and Epsom District Gas Company on IIth April 1923. The site is 150 yards south from the Thames, and was formerly known as ‘Church Walk’ and ‘Warple Road’, now both done away with. The soil had been considerably made up, and the hoard, which was in yellow sand, was about six feet from the present surface, but probably not more than about two feet from the original ground level. The weight of the hoard is about 9¾ lb. The objects, which were found together in a heap, are seventeen in number, and of these eight are lumps of founder's metal weighing together 6½ lb. From the dark red colour of the bronze it would seem that the percentage of tin is small, or it may be copper cake.

The bronze figure of Christ here illustrated is the property of Mrs. Hubert Cordes and has been in the possession of her family for upwards of a century. The family have long been resident in Monmouthshire, and the figure may, conceivably, be native to that part of the country.

In the year 1901 Sir Norman Lockyer made some instrumental observations at Stonehenge with a view to determining the angle of obliquity of the ecliptic which would cause midsummer sunrise to take place at a point on the horizon on the line of the axis of the structure.

The primary purpose of the following desultory notes is to place on record a number of pieces of English medieval alabaster work, some of unusual type or form, others resembling examples more or less familiar, which have lately come to my notice.

For some time past Mr. J. E. Sainty, of Norwich, has subjected the cliffs and the foreshore of the north-east coast of Norfolk to examination, with a view to finding there examples of flint implements. His researches, conducted with much care, have resulted in the finding of many interesting specimens, and, at his request, I now place on record a discovery of considerable importance.

At the meeting of the British Association in Edinburgh, 1921, I had the pleasure of handing to the Committee on the Distribution of Bronze Age Implements a description and full-size outline drawings of the bronze implements met with in the Isle of Man. At that time I had not been able to have them analysed. This has now been done by our Public Analyst, Mr. W. A. Fyffe, F.I.C., and may be put on record for comparison with other articles of the Bronze Age in the British Isles that have been so treated.

The parish church of St. James, Nayland, Suffolk, on the Essex borders, dates mainly from the fourteenth and early fifteenth century. The rood-loft stairs are visible on the south side of the chancel arch, but the rood-screen itself has entirely gone. It was taken down apparently in the eighteenth century, or perhaps earlier, and portions of its framework, consisting of three arches, can be seen incorporated in the grained and varnished partition, fitted in front with three large ‘horse-box’ pews, below the gallery at the west end of the church.

The earth-works at Great Berkhampstead which form one of the finest examples of a Norman Castle have also an interest almost unique in that they provide an example of (what may well be) siege-works of the thirteenth century. That this was the case was first suggested by Sir William Hope some ten or fifteen years ago, but the matter does not appear to have been fully considered in the light of all the available evidence.