When Tasmania was first settled in 1803, the English found a Primitive race with an early Palaeolithic civilization living there. Within forty years these aborigines were practically exterminated, and a race, the study of which would have thrown much interesting light upon prehistoric man, was allowed to pass away with barely a comment, and with a singular lack of observation by the settlers.

There has always been considerable doubt whether this race expressed themselves pictorially before the advent of Europeans. Ling Roth, indeed, in The Aborzgines of Tasmania, after citing most of the evidence that exists, goes so far as to say that the question of the existence of drawings before the coming of Europeans ‘is practically an open one, for the evidence is not satisfactory’. But in the last three or four years the discovery of rock-carvings in two distinct and widely separated districts has produced evidence that is conclusive.

When I suggested, in commenting on this quotation, that an African cattle-thief would laugh at Beech Bottom dyke, Mr Crawford did not agree; and the idea that seems to prevail with regard to the stopping-power of a ditch and bank is responsible for these notes.

Cattle-defences may be considered under two heads: 1, Fences: 2, Dykes: the latter being actually of secondary importance when the object in view is to keep cattle in or out; and stockades without a ditch do occur in Britain.

‘Gently undulating gravel plain ’, ‘ limitless expanse of rolling sand ’, ‘ succession of low sandstone ridges ’—such phrases are common in any book of desert travel, for most of the desert is featureless almost to monotony were it not that its very monotony has a charm which, for those who have felt it, no other landscape can rival. In the desert anything unusual attracts, a patch of rare shade, a hollow with a few dried bushes, a conspicuous hill,—one is drawn to each, sometimes to find the remains of some earlier and less fortunate visitor. So a 6000-foot mountain set down in the heart of one of the worst, one of the most ‘ howling ’, deserts in the world merits and receives its share of attention.

In the September number of ANTIQUIT (VIII, 290–302) Dr Wheeler analysed with characteristic brilliance the topographical and archaeological evidence for the relation of Roman and Saxon in Dark-Age London. He pointed out that the 330 acres enclosed by the Roman Walls were divided almost centrally by the Walbrook into two areas of rising ground, the eastern which we may term Cornhill, and the western Ludgate Hill. He showed that there is undeniable evidence epitomized in the position of the central basilica and of London Bridge to prove that the eastern of these was the nucleus of the Roman City, and that the inclusion of the western within the walls was intended ‘to provide generously for a development which only in part materialized’. He noted further that the evidence for the earliest Saxon settlement within the walls pointed with hardly less emphasis to their preference for the western area, where the foundation of St. Paul's, the less certain suggestion of early church dedications, the traditional site of the Royal Palace, the certain position of the Folk Moot, and the more frequent occurrence of small objects of the early Saxon period combine to indicate the focus of their settlement. So far we may tread securely in his footsteps; we may agree with his summary of the contrast— ‘Roman London began on the Hill above London Bridge and spread westwards; Saxon London emerged on the western hilltop and spread eastwards’.

In his appendix (pages 84–5) to his Changes in the Fauna of Wales within Historic Times, Mr Colin Matheson, refers to ‘ the old Welsh text known as Y Naw Helwriaeth or The Nine Huntings [which] has been generally regarded as setting forth the hunting customs among the early Welsh ’. This text has been published in the Myvyrian Archaiology (2nd edition, pp. 872-3) and in Dr John Davies’s Dictionarium duplex (1632). Both these printed texts however differ in various details from the three known manuscript versions, and while the versions of two of the manuscripts are fairly similar, that of the third differs markedly from the other two. An edition with annotations in Welsh of the three manuscript texts was published (for the first time) by the present writer in 1933. It was thought that since the texts presented problems of interest to students of British history, a collated translation of the two texts together with a translation of the third, and differing, text would prove to be of value to those unacquainted with Welsh.

It would seem that the Anglo-Saxon invasion of a great part of eastern Britain in the fifth century radiated fan-wise from the gateway of the Wash and of the Fenland Gulf. If this is true, it is not surprising. The position of the continental base of the Anglo-Saxons made the area a natural entry into the Midland plain; and the invaders, with the Wash behind them, gazed upon no unfamiliar scene. The region into which they came may not have been so different from their former homeland on the flats of northern Germany, the homeland which Bede tells us they had so completely deserted. They penetrated by way of the Fenland rivers, up the Nene, the Welland, the Ouse, and the Witham, and this big spread was supplemented to the north and to the south by the smaller river entrances, the Bure, the Yare, the Waveney, the Humber and so on. The archaeological finds, as plotted by Mr Thurlow Leeds, are located along the courses of navigable streams and their tributaries, and are disposed concentrically around the Fenland. Dr Cyril Fox has moreover indicated affinities, during the earlier Saxon period, between the opposite shores of this marshy gulf. All had changed, however, when the tribes emerged into the light of history. The Fenland basin, characterized at an earlier epoch by a certain cultural unity, had now become a frontier region, separating peoples and exercising a repelling action revealed in the making of the Anglo-Saxon States. Kingdoms, finding their limits here, partitioned the marshy wastes between them, and the barrier of the Fens became a permanent feature in the political geography of the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy.

In this note on Saxon London I am not concerned in detail with the wearisome question whether London did or did not survive through the Dark Ages of the 5th and 6th centuries. Were it not for the vague generalities of an obsessed 6th-century ‘Welshman’, writing a moral thesis probably in Brittany under difficulties which he himself deplores, no one would ever have suggested that London ceased to exist at the time of the Saxon invasions. Yet, it may be recalled, Gildas does not so much as mention London; he was not concerned with London; he was not indeed concerned with history save in so far as it could be subordinated to his propaganda against the sinners of western Britain. Whatever may have happened to the cities of the west, there is in truth no valid historical reason for supposing that London perished after the Roman period, to be born all over again in a Saxon England.

This is where Mr Myres and I don our cardboard armour, rattle our wooden sabres, and join battle to the death or tea-time.

Let me parry blow by blow, and, first, that one about the street-plan. I give that precedence because Mr Myres is (relatively) so serious about it. He regards the ‘chaos of curvilinear lanes’ which is the medieval street-plan of London as, above all, a ‘piece of positive evidence’ which makes any survival of Roman London through the Dark Ages ’extremely improbable’. As Mr Myres well knows, this argument goes back through William Page to Noah, and the only surprising thing about it is that Mr Myres should still find himself using it in this year of grace. The reply, in part at least, is almost equally ancient, but has never perhaps been developed as fully as the argument appears to deserve.

The unique interest of Sidonius lies in the fact that he ‘ stands between the old world and the new, and is a witness for both of them ’ (p. 166). His letters are almost the only non-theological documents of the fifteen centuries which have survived; and this fact alone gives them a historical value that cannot be exaggerated. A critical and well-documented biography by one who has made the subject his own is therefore most welcome. In the following pages I do not propose to say more by way of commendation of the admirable biography by Mr C. E. Stevens, but rather to consider certain special points in it which are of current interest, Needless to say, the interpretation of the history of the period is my own, and the author would very probably dissent strongly from it,

It is well known that in geologically recent times the British Isles have been affected by vertical movements, both upwards as shown by raised beaches and downwards as proved by submerged land surfaces and drowned valleys. There are still differences of opinion whether these movements result from changes in the level of the ocean surface or are due to real upward or downward movements of the land area. In the former case a change of sea level might be expected to produce within small limits the same amount of apparent elevation or depression of the land area, whereas in the latter case the amount of movement might vary at different parts of the coastline.

In recent years Ur has figured prominently and often as an important witness of the Great Flood of prehistoric times. But whatever may have been the cause and extent of that particular upheaval, it appears that the ancient city perished, paradoxically enough, for lack of water. A sudden shift in the course of the Euphrates probably doomed to desiccation the strip of land on which Ur had risen to become at length a powerful royal centre. That fitful whim of a lazy river may be placed at some period near the end of the pre-that time, however, Ur had endured for perhaps apsr leo-nCgh arsis ftiivaen m eirlale. nnBiay. Nothing short of a natural catastrophe, it would appear, could bring to a close a career of such heroic proportions.