Northern China forms an integral part of the north temperate zone of the Old World. It is, moreover, connected with western Asia and eastern Europe by a long but continuous belt of steppe presenting no transverse barriers to migration, whether faunal or human. It cannot, therefore, be treated as a region apart, save in a very limited and subordinate sense.

The surface consists in the main of mountains in the west and of plains in the east. Over much of it lie thick deposits of loess, extending from Chinese Turkistan right across eastern Asia, nearly to the Yellow Sea. These great accumulations of wind-borne soil were most probably formed during times roughly contemporary with the Riss-Wurm glaciation of Europe.

Twenty years have gone by since I was first appointed Director of Excavations at Ostia, and I feel that I have devoted the better part of my activity as an archaeologist to the great task of bringing the dead city back to life.

All that was known about Ostia when scientific investigation was first started there was the legendary tale of its foundation at the mouth of the Tiber by Ancus Marcius, fourth King of Rome ; its probable expansion under the republic, although the growth of Pozzuoli and the clogging up of the river’s bed would support the theory of a period of decline for Ostia at that time ; and its tremendous development under the Empire, especially in the second century. Of this there was proof in the vestiges of imperial constructions rising above ground and in the historically ascertained fact that Ostia was Rome’s trading centre and outlet on the sea. Little or nothing was known of the later period of the city, nor of its decline and final disappearance.

In 1933 it can hardly be alleged that Prehistory is a useless study, wholely remote from and irrelevant to practical life. In one great country at least, interpretations of supposed facts of Prehistory, imperfectly apprehended by an untrained mind of undoubted genius, have revolutionized the whole structure of society. No one who has read Mein Kampf, or even the extracts therefrom in The Times, can fail to appreciate the profound effect which theories of the racial superiority of ‘Aryans’ have exercised on contemporary Germany. In the name of these theories men are being exiled from public life and shut up in concentration camps, books are being burned and expression of opinions stifled just as, in the name of religious ideas, they were during fifteen long centuries of darkness.

The circumstances of the first production of glass are shrouded in mystery. The ancient authors give us little or no trustworthy information on the subject. Pliny the Elder, our chief authority, tells us a strange tale which is credible neither from the archaeological nor from the technical standpoint. He says that a party of Phoenician saltpetre-merchants landed by the mouth of the river Belus in Phoenicia. They set about lighting a fire to cook a meal, and for want of stones on the beach they took some blocks of saltpetre from their cargo to rest their kettle on. The heat of the fire fused the sand and the saltpetre into a vitreous mass. The story is probably a pure myth. From a technical point of view it is extremely doubtful if an open wood fire on a beach would be sufficient to fuse the sand and the saltpetre ; while from the archaeological standpoint it is certain that glass was known long before the Phoenicians were trading in the Mediterranean. The whole myth is based on the fact that in Pliny's own time—the 1st century A.D.—and for many centuries before, the sands of the Belus were widely used for glass-production. No author anterior in date to Pliny tells us anything at all about the origin of glass ; later authors, even as recently as the middle of the 19th century, for the most part repeat blindly Pliny’s story.

The remarkable garnet-inlaid jewellery from Teutonic graves of the Pagan Period in Kent can be safely recommended as one of the most promising subjects for a research-student that English archaeology has to offer. It is to be hoped that this short introductory study will attract attention to it.

Iona is a small island off the west coast of Scotland. It is famous throughout the world as the adopted home of Columba, the virtual founder of the Church of Scotland. It was in this island that he founded his monastery in 563 ; and it was from here that Aidan, the founder of Lindisfarne, came in 635 to christianize Northumbria. Thousands of tourists visit Iona every year, and are duly conducted round the ruins during the short hour or two allowed by the steamer’s call ; yet how many realize that, of the remains they see, not even the oldest came into existence until about 500 years after the death of Columba?