10 The Thirty-Fourth General Meeting. 
investigations. Hoare speaks of Wiltshire, in his preface, as a 
country little known and hitherto undescribed, and there can be no 
doubt that as a topographer he fulfilled his task admirably. He 
was sound in principle, and where he failed was through not applying 
his principles more thoroughly. He correctly established the se- 
quence of the different modes of interment, pronouncing inhumation 
in a contracted position to be the earliest, after which inhumation 
was practised conjointly with cremation; and inhumation in an ex- 
tended position he proved to be the latest mode of interment, but 
he failed to distinguish in some cages between Saxon and late Celtic 
burials. He distinguished primary from secondary interments in 
the same tumulus, and he correctly classified the three kinds of urns 
found in the graves as funereal urns, drinking vessels, and incense 
cups; but he described bronze dagger blades as lance heads, and, by 
that means, led Sir Samuel Meyrick into error in his work on the 
weapons and costume of the Ancient Britons, published in 1815. 
He claims with justice to be the first, with Mr. Cunnington, to 
take notice of the sites of British villages, and he attempted to 
classify the camps and earthworks by the size of their ramparts and 
external appearance, but his examination of them was cursory and 
insufficient for his conclusions. But where he failed totally was in 
neglecting to take any notice of the skeletons found in the graves. 
The scientific study of human osteology had not commenced in his 
time, and his mind was a blank upon all anthropological subjects. 
He thought it right to re-inter them quickly without measuring 
them. Here and there we find them spoken of only as the skeleton 
of a stout person or a tall person, and in only one instance he 
describes a skeleton, saying that ‘it grinned horribly a ghastly 
smile, a singularity that I have never before noticed.’ No doubt 
the skeleton must have been laughing at him for his unscientific 
method of dealing with it, and when we think of the large amount 
of racial evidence that he destroyed in this way, and the compara- 
tively small number of skeletons that have remained in the barrows 
to be examined since, it is almost enough to give any lover of 
antiquity a ghastly smile. Sir Richard Hoare’s researches were 
followed by those of Dean Merewether, which were published in 
