The President’s Address. 261 
have Jearned it by the aid of our practical archeology. One thing 
in speaking of this particular period is very remarkable. How came 
all the Roman civilization of those four hundred years to be lost ? 
sor lost it was. As soon as they left Britain, the immediate and 
first proceeding seems to have been utterly to have effaced every 
vestige of them. So many of the Roman villas bear marks of fire, 
that it is to be inferred that they were purposely burnt. In the city 
ef Bath, well known to them as it is to us, used by them for its hot 
springs, and embellished by them with fine temples, it was discovered 
a few years ago, in digging the ground for a new hotel, that the 
level of the old Roman city was covered with heaps of-rubbish, drift 
wood, and even peat, as if it had been purposely abandoned to utter 
neglect, and allowed to return to a state of nature. It is certainly 
curious (as I have already observed) that nothing whatsoever of those 
four hundred years should have been bequeathed to us in the way of 
_ history, except so much as would fill a newspaper : nothing in the 
forms of towns and villas, but what seems to have been instantly 
destroyed; and yet after an interval of fourteen or fifteen centuries, 
we find ourselves in this very Britain, brought up, as it were from 
eur cradle, to love anything that has a flavour of classical Rome. 
For this revived taste, and for the boon of Latin grammar, we have 
to thank, not the old Britons, who, after the Roman four centuries, 
let everything run to waste again, but our Teutonic ancestors—the 
Anglo-Saxons who followed them, and who, when the Roman Em- 
pire was broken up in the West, brought the Latin tongue back into 
this country along with their own. Those Teutonic ancestors, the 
Anglo-Saxons who prevailed for, say six hundred years, down to the 
Norman Conquest, have in their turn, left plenty of work for arche- 
ologists of every description. Again we cannot but wonder at the 
enormous amount of record and of history, that has absolutely per- 
ished. I may be allowed, I hope, to say that I am glad to see in 
the programme that your attention is to be called on Thursday, by 
Mr. Baron, to “The Study of, Anglo-Saxon and its value to the 
Archeologist,” so I leave you in his hands for that long period and ° 
pass on to say that even from the time when William I. succeeded 
them down to the reign of Henry III.—(call it one hundred and fifty 
