The President’s Address. 15 
a breadth index as low as 69, forty skulls from the chambered long 
barrows of Gloucestershire’ had the somewhat higher index of 71, 
and these, he considered, afforded evidence of a mixture of tribes ; 
although 71 is a longer skull than that of any existing European 
people. He thought the chambered long barrows showed by their 
contents that they continued to be used by the aboriginal tribes up 
to and within the Roman era, and the plain bowl barrow also, he 
believed, to belong to the aboriginal tribes; whilst the bell-shaped 
and disc-shaped barrows he thought were the graves of the Belge. 
It is evident, therefore, that we must not lose sight of these two 
distinct races in our investigations into the relics of the Romanised 
Britons, and the district immediately to the west of where we are 
now assembled appears to be that which is likely to be most fruitful 
in evidence relating to that period. As we go westward from 
Salisbury to Blandford, we pass over a region which on two separate 
lines of evidence may be regarded as an ancient ethnical frontier. 
Here, by the investigations of Dr. Beddoe and others into the 
physical conditions of the existing population, we begin to come 
upon traces of the short dark-haired people whom he believes to be 
the survivors of the earliest wave of Britons. My own measure- 
ments of the present inhabitants of the district confirm this opinion. 
Here also, in the neighbourhood of Woodyates, we cross the western 
boundary of the region of bell and disc-shaped barrows, which Dry 
Thurnam believed to be the graves of the Belg, and pass over to 
the region of the bowl-shaped barrows, containing inferior relics, 
which he conjectures to have belonged to the aboriginal Durotriges, 
and the twenty-one barrows which I have opened at Rushmore, 
to the west of this boundary line, have all been found to be bowl 
barrows, or bowl barrows with a ditch round them, which Thurnam 
thought to be a later combination of the bowl and bell-shaped 
forms. It is a position which, probably owing to the extent of 
dense forest to the west and south in prehistoric times, has always 
afforded a standing point for the earliest races in resisting the en- 
roachments of succeeding waves of migration from the east. Here, 
or hereabouts, Professor Rhys has shown that the Goidels, or first 
wave of the Celts, for some time contended against the Brythons, 
