The Sutton Hoo Ship Burial, with its great store of treasure from the early Kingdom of East Anglia, was discovered and excavated in 1939, between May and 26th August. That is now twenty-five years ago. Eight days after the work's determinedly unhurried close, the country was at war. Jubilee reminiscence of those extraordinary weeks has had no space, till now, to spare for the almost miraculous alliance of fine weather with human enterprise and skill, which gave us from Suffolk this 'finest archaeological discovery ever made in Great Britain, perhaps in Europe' [I]. The roll of fame is nevertheless well known, and was rehearsed last year by Mr Charles Green in his book on the discovery [2]: Mrs Edith Pretty, the landowner, author of the enterprise, and donor of the whole find to the nation; Basil Brown and his chief Guy Maynard of Ipswich Corporation Museum; the fuller muster of talent assembled soon beside them, under Mr C . W. Phillips, for the Office of Works (as the Ministry then was called), among which the names Piggott, Grimes and Crawford stand out especially; and the late Commander Hutchison, R.N., then of the Science Museum, who drew the lines of the 85-foot ship.

The Australian continent was peopled during the Pleistocene epoch. Positive evidence for this migration is lately emerging from that limbo known to archaeologists as (suspense account', a void into which many oddments have been shot over the years. Probably the most exotic claims were coincident with Dubois' revelation of Pithecanthropus in Java, when Australian optimists exhibited casts of the imprints left by (human' feet and buttocks, in allegedly Pliocene dune limestone from Victoria. This prompted Otto Schoetensach, progenitor of Homo heidelbergensis, to pronounce Australia as the probable focus of human evolution; both he and H. Klaatsch saw, in aboriginal techniques of tree-climbing, direct vestiges of arboreal ancestry [I].

The stone crosses at Ruthwell in Dum- friesshire and at Bewcastle in Cumberland are probably the most discussed pieces of sculpture in the British Isles (PLS. XLI-XLII). It is right that they should be, for they have a artistic content that is high by any standards, they wholly outclass any possible contemporaries in Western Europe, and they are among the earliest examples of a notable and long-lasting form of Saxon art. Moreover, they are not only of importance to the art-historian but to the historian as well, for they have qualities that tell us a great deal about the culture, the religious feelings and even the political development of the society that erected them. It is therefore a matter of more than ordinary concern to establish, as firmly as the evidence allows, their date and their origin. All but one of the major critics of the last forty years-J. Br~ndsted, Sir Alfred Clapham, Sir Thomas Kendrick, Mr Lawrence Stone and Mr Ralegh Radford-are agreed that they are of the late 7th century, or at the latest of the first decade of the 8th. Only W. G. Collingwood has proposed a different date, in the mid-late 8th century, and he has had no supporters.

The stone pillar of Bantry (PL. xLv a) stands on top of a rounded grassy hill one mile west of the old Bantry railway station in County Cork. Below it, just out of sight, is the comfortable Georgian red brick of Bantry House, whose demesne once included the pillar. Below that again are the waters of Bantry Bay, formerly one of the bases of the British Atlantic Fleet, and scene of the abortive landing attempt in 1798 of Wolfe Tone and the French invasion force.