80 
Wilts Obituary. 
most learned archeologist. The General started on an excavation with 
no theory to support, and no desire merely to find museum specimens. 
He simply recorded everything—no matter how uninteresting it might be 
—that he found or observed, and then at the end tabulated the results. 
When he was engaged on Wansdyke someone asked his opinion as to its 
age. He said he had none—he was digging in order to be able to form 
one. In the same spirit he urged the importance of illustrating as far as 
possible not only the few remarkable objects found during any excavation, 
but also the great mass of the odds and ends—the bits of pottery, the 
fragments of bronze or iron, the nails, &c., &c.—and he set the example 
himself by giving the most careful drawings of every bit of ornamental 
pottery, every fragment of metal, however “rubbishy,’”’ which his ex- 
cavations produced, with the result that the evidences of his work are 
there for the archzologist of the future to build on, as surely as though 
he had been present when Wor Barrow was removed bodily down to the 
original chalk, or the whole surface of the South Lodge Camp with its ditch 
and its rampart was laid bare. For whatever the General did, he did 
thoroughly. His labourers at Rushmore had been trained to the work, 
and they were overlooked by assistants, skilled draughtsmen and 
surveyors, who also had been specially trained by the General, and no 
excavation was ever allowed to proceed unless either he himself or one 
of his skilled assistants was present the whole of the time—to mark 
down the exact position of every object found, on the large scale plans 
and sections prepared beforehand for that purpose. Then, when the 
field work was finished, the pottery was carefully classified according to 
its age; the animal bones, all of which perfect enough to be measured, 
were carefully preserved, were compared with type specimens of the 
existing red deer, the pig, the Kerry cow, or the St. Kilda sheep—of 
which living examples were kept at Rushmore, as well as skeletons, — 
expressly for the purposes of comparison; the Kerry cow and the St. 
Kilda sheep being selected as being the nearest to the sheep and cow of 
Romano-British days of any modern breed. In the same way the human 
skulls and bones were most carefully and exactly measured and compared. 
Everything was drawn or photographed for future publication; and, 
lastly, an exact model to scale, showing the ground as it was before the 
excavations were begun, and the full results of the excavations themselves, 
with all the more important finds shown in situ, was made in plaster 
and deposited with the finds themselves in the museum-at Farnham—so 
that the archeologist who visits Farnham can still see the Romano- 
British villages of Rotherley and Woodcuts, and the sections through 
Bokerley Dyke and Wansdyke—in miniature—precisely as they appeared 
when the excavations were complete. This most valuable method of 
preserving the evidence of excavation has since been followed in some 
instances—such as the excavations at Silchester—by other excavators, 
but it was the General who set the example, and who—as the very ex- 
tensive series of models at Farnham show—used the method more 
largely than anyone else has done. For all this work it is obvious that 
not only .time and knowledge, but also money to no small amount, was 
