It has been seen how tin evidently came to be known at Byblos (Gebeil) through the occurrence of its ore in the two rivers near that city. It has also been seen that its presence there mixed with copper ore led on naturally to the manufacture of bronze, which became known to the Egyptians as ‘Asiatic copper’. Now we may turn to the state of affairs far away to the north and west where conditions prove to have been totally different from those obtaining on the coast of central Syria.

Many of the Grim's ditches and others of similar character in East and South England have been tentatively dated to the Late Roman or Saxon periods. The question of their date and purpose has frequently received attention in Antiquity, notably by Sir Cyril Fox and Mr O. G. S. Crawford.

But all these Grim's ditches need not be alike, and the group of linear earthworks known by this name in Cranborne Chase is especially distinctive. Parts of it can perhaps best be compared with the Grovely Grim's ditch, with which it is almost certainly associated, and which was described by Mr Crawford in his article on ‘Our Debt to Rome’ as being pre-Saxon. Since then Sir Charles Oman has suggested a later date for it, and put forward the view that Grim's dyke, and other ditches in the southeast of Wiltshire ‘were thrown up to mark the limit of the Saxon frontier’.

In the Middle Ages wool was so valuable that it was necessary to have an accurate means of weighing whereby the merchant, in the presence of the farmer at the farm, could weigh the wool to the satisfaction of all concerned.

The method described below was used all throughout the Middle Ages and until quite recently, and as I am one of the last of those who were brought up from boyhood in the use of this system and in conforming to some of the ancient customs of the country Wool-Staplers, it seems only right that I should prepare this record before it is too late to do so.

The religious ideas of the illiterate villagers of South India, nominal adherents to Hinduism, are extremely vague, ill-defined and confused. In one respect alone is there general understanding and agreement; this is the universal acceptance of the belief that demon spirits prowl around their homes, ever seeking opportunity to inflict misery and disease upon those who do not adequately propitiate these potential workers of evil. The basis of this belief reaches back into a distant past, antecedent to the influx into the plains of India, through the northwest passes, of those swarms of Aryan-speaking people who brought with them the Vedic cult of the sun, moon and planets, fire, wind and rivers, humanized by anthropomorphic ideology. On entry into India this glorious imagery found itself in conflict with two aboriginal cults strongly entrenched in the religious beliefs of the land. One of these was the worship of gods and goddesses of whom the most honoured or dreaded as the case might be, were those concerned with procreation, the continued fertility of the fields, and with the infliction of epidemic diseases and other miseries. Of these deities we have little precise information but it seems certain that phallic worship, typified in the lingam of Siva, was incorporated in this cult, and that many of the ills that afflict mankind were considered as due to the malevolence of malignant demons and to the jealous hatred of the living possessed by the disembodied spirits of the dead. The other and milder cult native to the soil was the worship of trees and serpents, or rather of the spirits or influences inhabiting them or associated therewith.

Why Berkshire? Well, any other county might have been chosen; that in Berkshire there are both the Romano-British city of Silchester and the ruins of an abbey founded in Norman times may have influenced the choice. As for the last word of the title, ‘interlacings’ will be confined here to a pattern of curved strands. This rules out such motives as the zig-zags of the filigree on the handle of the Sumerian dagger and the Coptic meanderings of one strand only.

There are, of course, many examples of interlacing to be seen nowadays. Men criss-cross their shoe-strings, unless they have been taught to lace them straight across as they do in the Army; a basket is made of interlacing canes; a hurdle of interlacing wattles; women formerly interlaced the strands of their long hair and the manes and tails of horses are often treated similarly. A cane carpet-beater is an excellent example of interlacing. The ‘under and over’ of the canes make for both strength and resiliency. The implement is remarkably attractive in appearance, an instance of the combination of the arts of necessity and of form.

A Collection consisting of some 90 objects of bronze and iron which touches life and art in Celtic antiquity at more points than any deposit hitherto found in Wales was discovered in 1943 a few miles from Holyhead, Anglesey. It has now become the property of the National Museum of Wales at Cardiff, the principal donor being Mr Evan R. Hughes, of Holyhead.

The collection includes weapons—fragmentary swords and daggers and spears; indestructible elements of vehicles—iron tyres, nave-hoops, bollard and linch-pins; and of harness—terrets, loop and numerous bridle-bits; things of social and economic interest—gang-chains for captives, currency bars, sickle, and fragmentary cauldron (or waterclock); of ceremonial interest—the central portion of a bronze trumpet, a wand of ash-wood decorated with spiral bronze ribbon; personalia—the bronze mounts of a wooden casket. All the objects were found in peat; many were deeply stained with vivianite, being associated with animal bones—of horse, ox, pig, sheep and dog.