In these islands we have been tardy in recognizing Folk Culture as an independent science. As the editor of Folkliv, Professor Sigurd Erixon, states in his Foreword: ‘It has long been leading a more or less dependent existence as an ambulating guest of certain related branches of science, which, thanks to the force of circumstances, were consolidated earlier. Generally it has been awarded a certain amount of space in archaeological, historical, artistic, geographical or philological publications. … The ethnologists of present times certainly recall that sponsorship and hospitableness with great gratitude. It is to be regretted however that there are far too many instances of ethnology not having attained such a development nor having become such a factor of education as it would appear entitled to’. This is regrettably true of the British Isles. As far as I am aware, there is no learned journal published here dealing exclusively with the problems of Folk Culture: with one exception, there is no department of Folk Culturein any of our national museums, nor is there a Chair of Folk Culture in any British university.

It is now recognized that during the Pleistocene, or even duringa later prehistoric period, there were in northern Africa human races related to the existing Bushmen and the Hottentots of the south. The shape of the skull in some of the early Egyptians, indeed, suggests relationship to the Bushmen. The discovery in the Anglo- Egyptian Sudan of a new type of fossil human skull with several resemblances to that of a Bushman, is therefore of great interest. The specimen was found in February 1924 by Mr W. R. G. Bond, who was then Governor of the Fung Province of the Anglo-Egyptia Sudan. It was embedded in a limestone concretion, which lay a few feet above low-stage river level on the foreshore of the Blue Nile at Singa about 200 miles south of Khartoum. I have to thank Mr G. W. Grabham, then Government Geologist, for the opportunity of studying the fossil.

The village of İznik, north-east of Brussa, and far from all traderoutes, is today the mere ghost of what was once an important city. It is quite hidden within the ancient circumvallation, and occupies scarcely a third of the former area of the town. The wall itself, one of -the most impressive and best-preserved Byzantine monuments of Asia Minor, forms an irregular polygon (plan, FIG. I). The lacus Ascanius washes it on the west, while the other sides are bordered by a green, well-wooded plain, gradually giving place on the north-east to the slopes of Elmali dagh. A charming view of the village and walls can be abtained from a small knoll about 300 metres east of the city, with the lake shimmering in the distance and the fields shaded with cypresses, planes, walnut and other fruit-trees. The description of Catullus still holds good (Nicaeaeque ager uber aestuosae, 46.5): nature here is inexhaustible, and gives in abundance of the finest fruits to anyone who tills the earth. From May to October the weather is nearly always good, and in the height of summer the heat can be unbearable. Certainly the air is no longer pure and healthy as it was in Byzantine days; neglected water-courses and pools of subterranean water have brought malaria in their train. Nor is the sea alive with boats, for there is no fishing. Yet within recent years an improvement has taken place in those conditions which gave older travellers reason for feeling melancholy or annoyance, and it begins to look as if the village were slowly awakening from its long sleep.

N a recent article in the English Historical Review (vol. LII, pp. 193 ff.) Mr C. E. Stevens has examined the question of the ‘Twenty-Eight Cities of Britain’ which are spoken of by Gildas (‘De Excidio’, chap. III) ; and, on the basis that Gildas knew of some Romano-British Notitia Britanniarum, has attempted with considerable success to discover what cities these must have been. Bede (Hist. Eccl. I, I) and Nennius (Hist. Britt., ed. Mommsen, pp. 147 ff.) both repeat Gildas' remark in much the same words ; and in Section VI of the Historia Brittonum their names are given, with the heading Haec sunt nomina omniurn civitatum quae sunt in tota Brittania, quarurn numerus est xxviii. They are in Old Welsh of about the eighth or ninth centuries, and can therefore be contemporary with the compilation of the Historia Brittonum. Each is described as Cair, the Welsh equivalent of civitas in the late Latin sense. Another version of the Historia Brittonum has made the number into thirty-three, no doubt by misreading XXVIII as XXXIII ; the deficiency is filled up with five extra names also in Old Welsh. Some of the forms are however rather younger than in the first version (e.g. Cair Lion for Cair Legion), and the Expanded List may be a century or so later than the original.

The lofty expanse of heather, bog and bare granite which forms the region under discussion in this paper, contains a numerous and in many ways unique group of prehistoric antiquities. Although Devonshire archaeologists have for many years been doing good work in this district, it has never, to the best of my knowledge, been comprehensively dealt with in the light of modern methods and experience. Consequently, the prehistory of Dartmoor still presents something of a mystery. After describing the material at our disposal, I shall here make a few tentative suggestions which seem to resolve some of the difficulties encountered in the interpretation of the archaeological evidence, and which may throw some light on the prehistory of the rest of southwest England.

The simple, good-hearted strong man is a character perennially popular, and at times has become almost a national ideal. We sophisticates of today do not so obviously deify our expression of the desirable qualities as did our forefathers; but we can at least appreciate the mixture of endearment and reverence with which the heroic demigod who appears as the Herakles or Hercules of classical myth was regarded. The combination of the rather likable human failings of an enormous appetite and a naif boastfulness with the godlike gifts of superhuman strength and fortitude in adversity produced an eminently credible deity, someone to whom alike the timorous maiden might pray for protection, the bluff soldier for understanding support in a punitive raid—in fact a combined apotheosis of Tarzan and of Bulldog Drummond. Such is the Hercules we see in the classical pantheon, Hercules at the height of his glory. But, as Mr De la Mare has said, it is the edges of things that are the most interesting. What of the edges of the Hercules myth? Where and when did it first crystallize out from the cloudy mixture of primitive man’s thoughts, and what forms did it take after Christianity had driven away the old gods to a holeand-comer existence in folklore and old wives’ tales ?

T was Boucher de Perthes and some of his precursors who originated the idea of an age of worked stone : previously the only stone implements recognized as such were polished axes, arrowheads and a few particularly well-made flint knives. On the other hand it is generally agreed that, besides worked stone, which as a rule is all that has survived, fossil man must have used wood for many of his weapons and implements ; though with the exception of a pointed stake from Clacton (preserved in peat with remains of Elephas antiquus) nothing made of this material is known until we come to the neolithic piledwellings. Mainly as the result of the excavations of Lartet and Christy in the Dordogne (1863) it was learnt that hard animal substances such as bone, ivory and deer's horn, which were preserved by the limestone matrix of caves and rock-shelters had also played a large part in the industrial activities of man. This already advanced industry must have been far removed in time from the first utilization of bone, for it shows a technique that is highly developed—a technique in which the splitting of bone is first associated with and then superseded by sawing with gravers and smoothing with scrapers. There can be no doubt therefore that the stilettos, spear-heads, etc., of the Later Palaeolithic period must have had more ancient prototypes of worked bone. In fact the only Middle Palaeolithic examples known today of bone-working by means of attrition and scraping are few in number—rib-bones sharpened by rubbing, occasional awls similarly sharpened—and the two large spear-points from the Upper Mousterian of Castillo (Spain) and La Quina (Charente, France).

My subject should not be construed by the refined as a malicious innuendo, nor by the vulgar(unrepresented here, of course) as a ‘ dirty dig ’. The transition from ape to engineer is from the ridiculous to the sublime-or, at any rate, from a little short of one to a little short of the other. This handsome statement must serve as my panegyric on mechanical science. As an anthropologist, I am perturbed by the fact that human invention has outstripped man's organic development, and his control of nature his control of himself. So I propose to discuss the organic basis of mechanical achievement and the cause of man's physical and social lag in relation to his material progress.

Archaeologists in general and students of ceramics in A particular largely live in an ancient world of their own creation. They have built up the background of the period they study by means of the material objects available to them, and they have filled in the gaps largely by hypothesis, analogy and guesswork. This, after all, is part of the game. They have decided that they have no alternative. Rarely and with caution they draw comparisons between living and dead primitive cultures. Usually they draw back in alarm, for aboriginal Australians and Bushmen have the irritating habit of not always coming up to the desired level of similarity when comparisons are made between them and men of Neolithic or earlier cultures. And so the archaeologists are driven in on themselves. Perhaps it is just as well.

The racial prehistory of Great Britain, while incomplete, has been brought to a provocative stage in its reconstruction. What follows is an attempt to set forth the framework of present knowledge, with its major lacunae, for the particular scrutiny of the archaeologists, on whom the anthropologists must largely rely for the testing of its stresses and strains.

In the last part of ANTIQUIT(YM arch 1938), Mr Nowell Myres has said certain things-many of them excessively handsome things about the excavation of Verulamium, and in particular about the Report which was written three or four years ago and was published by the Society of Antiquaries two years ago. In his commentary there is much that he and I may allow to rest in our mutual understanding. But there is much else that claims no such sanctuary ; and since he himself pleads guilty to the ‘ somewhat ungracious procedure ’ of having ‘deliberately taken up not so much the positive achievements of the authors’ work at Verulamium as what may be termed its negative results,’ I am tempted for a few pages to share his guilt and his ‘ ungraciousness ’-to deal, in short, with one or two matters which have escaped Mr Myres and must therefore have escaped other critics.

Not least in interest among subjects of archaeological study is that which has to do with the types of fortification constructed by organized communities in the past. These, once the habit of town-dwelling had become fixed, seem to have tended to fall into two major classes : the arx, acropolis, or citadel, one of whose functions it was to provide a temporary refuge in emergency; and the enceinte or city-wall proper, designed to afford permanent protection to the group living within it. Sometimes the two forms occur in combination; more often, singly.

The first type we frequently, though by no means always, find situated on a height ; the acropolis of Athens and the Capitoline Hill at Rome are familiar examples. The second class, on the other hand, seems to have developed more especially in those alluvial plains on which sprang up the great river-valley civilizations of the Ancient World. To it belong the tremendous earthworks constructed slightly over two thousand years ago about the city of Ch‘ang-an (meaning ‘Long Peace’ ; possibly Ptolemy’s ‘Sera Metropolis’), the capital of the then recently established Chinese empire.