The whole of modern biology has been called ‘ a commentary on the Origin of Species ’(Charles Singer, 1949). In a sense this is true. Following the endeavours to trace the natural histories of the various living organisms, attempts are still in progressto determine the modes, patterns and directive forces of evolution. The end of the 19thand the first quarter of the 20th centuries were characterized by morphological studies incomparative anatomy, the rise of geology and the birth of genetics. The second quarterof this century has witnessed a phenomenal expansion in technical advances leading tocritical appraisals of previous concepts and to maturation of new, revolutionary theoriesbased upon seemingly disconnected disciplines-experimental embryology, genetics,physkal anthropology, palaeontology and geology. One of the unacclaimed causes of thecorrelation of knowledge is the post-war mastery of air travel. The spectacular rise ofthe ' basic ' biological sciences due to emergent industrial and atomic competitive needsin an era of socio-economic enlightenment is another factor giving rise to the pursuit ofsuch knowledge. In a general sense this is the end of a Darwinian ' cycle ' ; the favourablesocio-political situation of the 19th century formed the ' overture ' to the Darwiniantheory. Act One saw the development, championing and triumphs of the intellectualinterpretations of ' Darwinists '. In Act Two the weaknesses and the vital issues of theapplication of the theory to various living forms and particularly to Homo sapims wereexposed, mainly through the clashes of ' neo-Darwinists ' and ' neo-Lamarckists '. Thisled to Act Three in which the various sciences (and especially genetics), competing toillustrate and develop alternative theories of evolution, blossomed out, particularly in theirsearch for the mechanisms of the evolutionary processes. In the final scene of this Actthe socio-political situation once again formed an important background as the diversedisciplines combine tq unify concepts, and, in fact, to prove evolution.

In May 1956, while visiting the megalithic temples of Tarxien, which stand on high ground less than a mile from the inner creeks of Grand Harbour, massed graffiti of ships were observed on two adjacent uprights in the ‘Third Temple’.

Benjamin Franklin appears to have been the first to call Man the ‘tool-making animal’ while Thomas Carlyle in Sartor Resartus (1833)declared : ‘Without tools he is nothing.’ In pre-Darwinian days the definition of Man was no more than philosophical exercise. That Man might have evolved from lower animals was in the minds of very few people in those days. Certainly the question of how to draw a boundary between pre-human and human had not yet become a practical issue. Even the conception that Man had a long unrecorded past had barely taken root a hundred years ago, although the seeds of the idea had been sown by a few men far ahead of their time, such as Isaac de la Peyrère, who published a book in Pans in 1655 on Primi Nomines ante Adamum, and John Frere whose discovery of flint tools in brickearths at Home in Suffolk led him to infer in 1797 that they had been ‘ used by a people who had not the use of metals ’, and ‘ belonged to a very ancient period indeed, even before that of the present world ’.

The Aeolian Islands are situated off the north coast of Sicily, not far from the entrance to the Straits of Messina. They can be reached by a daily service of steamboats from the port of Milazzo, 20 miles west of Messina. There is a daily train, called Freccia di Sul, that goes direct from Milan to Palermo, stopping at Milazzo; The northernmost of the islands is Stromboli with its famous active volcano. The chief town is Lipari on the island of that name; here on its acropolis excavations directed by Professor Bernabo Brea on behalf of the Soprintendenza alle Antichita della Sicilia Orientale have revealed a stratified succession of huts, ranging from the neolithic period down to Hellenistic, Roman and modern times. These excavations and others on other islands have shown that, small though they be, the islands once played an important part in the culture of the western Mediterranean.

For about a century it has been assumed that during the Neolithic and part of the Bronze Age the inhabitants of what is now Switzerland built pile-dwellings on the lakes. This interpretation of the finds was put forward, as is well known, by Dr F. Keller, who did so much for Swiss prehistory. His theory was based upon a comparison of the very scanty remains of prehistoric buildings in Switzerland with pile-dwellings that are to be seen today in many parts of the world, erected both on dry land and also on the shores of lakes and of the sea, standing in water. In spite of some opposition, Keller's interpretation appeared so convincing that it aroused great interest and was generally accepted by archaeologists. It was not accidental that Keller had one of his important books on piledwellings published in England. Every museum in the world endeavoured to obtain some specimens of the Swiss finds, and today it is practically impossible to make even an approximately complete list of the older finds from the pile-dwellings.

With the general acceptance of the doctrine of organic evolution continuity between human history and natural history was also accepted. The latter became just the latest chapters in a single historical record with archaeology bridging the gap between the record of the rocks and the written record. The content of these latest chapters may be termed social evolution, and the Darwinian mechanisms of variation, adaptation, selection and survival may be invoked to elucidate the history of man as well as that of other organisms. But while the use of these terms may emphasize the continuity of history, it may also cause confusions and, in fact, misled some early anthropologists and archaeologists when they tried uncritically to apply Darwinian formulae to human societies or artifacts.

The recent general accounts of Miss Kathleen Kenyon's brilliant series of campaigns at Tell es-Sultan, the mound in Jordan generally conceded to be that of ancient Jericho, will be well known to readers of Antiquity (cf. especially Wheeler, no. 119, 132–6; Kenyon, no. 120, 184—95). Sir Mortimer Wheeler and Miss Kenyon interpret the prehistoric archaeological assemblages of the two basal phases of Tell es-Sultan as evidence of civization (Miss Kenyon's italics), and the surprisingly early radiocarbon dates for the upper portion of the second basal phase of the site are accepted at face value. Miss Kenyon, in fact, believes (Ill. London News, no. 6,123 [13 October, 19561, 612) that Tell es-Sultan was already a ‘town’ at a date ‘which must approach the 8th millennium’ B.C.

How are cultural similarities in non-contiguous regions to be explained? This has been an important question in ethnology for many years and still remains so to this day. E. B. Tylor termed it the ‘ great problem, the solution of which will alone bring the study of civilization into its full development as a science’. It has been important for two reasons : first because it involves a theory of, or attitude towards, culture in general; culture is thought of as having one kind of nature if these similarities are explained in one way, but having a different nature if explained in another. Secondly, the question is important because we wish to know in the case of particular instances whether similarities are due to independent or to a common origin; quite apart from general theory we wish to know, and feel that it is important to know, whether, for example, the practice of mummification in aboriginal Peru originated indigenously or whether it had its origin, as some have believed, in ancient Egypt.

On a bit of marsh-mound land cast up in the James River was planted the first permanent English settlement in America. The landing at Jamestown, 13 May (o.s.), 1607, did not represent the first attempt to found an English colony on the eastern seaboard. In 1585 an expedition under the command of Sir Richard Grenville and with Ralph Lane as Lieutenant-Governor established the ill-fated Roanoke Island colony off the coast of North Carolina. By 1590 it had vanished—to this day the fate of the ‘Lost Colony’ is uncertain.