Among the earliest monuments of the Buddhist faith as propagated through India by king Asoka in the third century B.C. is a peculiar class of structure known as a stupa, and since Fergusson (1) first put forward the idea at the end of the last century it has been vaguely realized that these monuments were in all probability a formalized version of nothing more or less than a specialized type of prehistoric (and pre-Buddhist) round cairn. The possible implications of this prototype's peculiar features in reference not only in oriental, but in European archaeology, were pointed out by Mr Harold Peake with characteristic acumen (2), but no convenient summary of the relevant Indian material has appeared in an English archaeological journal, and a recent discovery in Jaipur State has thrown most interesting light on the subject at large. It seems therefore desirable to bring the results of the Bairat excavations before a wider archaeological public than that reached by the original report by the excavator, the late Rai Bahadur D. R. Sahni, and to consider it in relation to the wider question of the origins of the stupa and of the curious features which are presented in formalized guise on the elaborate monuments which represent the supreme artistic achievements of the Sunga Dynasty in the closing centuries of the pre-Christian era. I am deeply indebted to Mr Peake not only for material amplifying his original thesis, but for stimulating discussion and correspondence on the whole question. The latter part of this paper is in fact to such a degree based on his ideas that it amounts to an appendix in which I have paraphrased views exprcssed by him and shared by myself.

In a previous paper (1) an attempt was made to describe the inter-relations of man and bear in Europe from early times to the present day. In many ways the influence of the wolf has been more important than that of the bear on the habits and thoughts of European man. Occasionally it has figured in a favourable light, as in the case of the she-wolf credited with suckling the twin founders of the City on Seven Hills (though even here the double meaning of lupa—applied in a transferative sense to ladies whose character would not bear close investigation—has led some authors to a conjecture which it might not have been politic to mention to any patriotic inhabitant of the grandeur that was Rome). But in general, whether in Italy or elsewhere, no animal has been so hated and feared. Among the ancient Greeks in the south—whose Lyceum at Athens and sanctuary of Apollo Lukeios at Sicyon may have originated in efforts to propitiate the wolves-as among the Letts of the north who, perhaps as late as the 17th century, sacrificed a goat each December to the wolves so that their other livestock might be spared(2) ; from Scotland where priests offered the prayer, quoted by Fittis (3) from the old Litany of Dunkeld, for deliverance ‘from robbers and caterans, from wolves and all wild beasts’, to Russia where peasants pronounced a spell on St. George's Day with the recurring plea, ‘God grant the wolf may not take our cattle‘ (4); the wolf was the great destroyer, the despoiler of flocks and herds and man's chief enemy in the animal world.

In his two articles on querns (1) Dr Cecil Curwen has given us a really epoch-making contribution to prehistory and history. Not only has he provided the prehistorian with a new instrument for the establishment of chronology, but he has drawn the attention of excavators to a revolutionary but curiously neglected advance in technology. For the rotary mill is the first major application of rotary motion since the invention of the potter's wheel and the lathe in the remote Oriental Copper Age; it led on directly to the invention of geared machinery and the water-wheel and so to the first employment of inanimate motive power apart from the harnessing of the winds to the sail. Though this invention took place in the full light of history, the sole evidence for its origin, apart from a single reference in a writer so late as Pliny (2), is purely archaeological. Unfortunately it is still rather thin; excavators of classical and barbarian sites have generally been too preoccupied with statuary and art-objects on the one hand, with types accepted as chronologically significant on the other, to provide the historian of science with the data he craves. Truhelka for instance, generally so scrupulous in the full publication of all his finds, does not illustrate nor even describe a single quern from Dolja Dolina in Bosnia where he found plenty (3).

Many attempts have been made to elucidate the problems created by a critical examination of the obscure constructional methods employed by the Ancient Egyptians when building sailing craft for use on the Nile and, alternatively, at sea. None has proved entierly satisfactoy. Two reasons are chiefly responsible; the first is lack of adequate knowledge on the part of most writers of the mechanical principles governing ship designing at the present day; the other is a similar lack of any wide and intimate acquaintance with the designs followed and methods employed by peoples who retain primitive features in the construction of their sailing craft, particularly on the Nile in its upper reaches beyond the confines of Egypt. That it has been my good fortune to have had opportunities to study at first-hand the construction of sailing craft in every important quarter of the world, and, in especial, that of those in use on all sections of the Nile from its mouths to its source in Uganda, is my excuse for the present attempt to explain away some of the difficulties that have troubled or misled so many previous writers on this subject.

From 29 August to 5 September 1942, some four hundred and fifty persons, members of the Hellenic and Roman Societies and of the Classical Association and their friends, met in conference in Oxford to hear lectures, papers and discussions and to study special exhibitions of classical MSS, rare printed books and photographs and the cream of the Evans bequest of ancient coins. No one could doubt the motive which had brought them there, as they flocked day after day to the Sheldonian Theatre, the Divinity School, Christ Church Chapter House and other University lecture-halls to partake hungrily of the choice and varied fare spread before them. This was no mere gathering of professionals, but a congress of cultivated men and women of many walks in life and of all ages, bound together by devotion to our common heritage and all enjoying something of the very best from scholars of British and other nationalities, each a specialist in his own part of that all-embracing field of humane letters, art and thought which is the Classics. The dynamic, as opposed to static, character of classical studies was stamped upon all the lectures.