342 



\ \TURE 



[January 



II. I'y I 



number of good friends who hasten to point out and 

 correct such inaccuracy. 



Here we have a life in which merit and good fortune 

 have combined as they rarely do. No external difficul- 

 ties have stood in the way of the straight-line develop- 

 ment of the growing spirit, and the acknowledgments 

 of his contemporaries have crowned his f^reat merits 

 soon enough to give his life the benefit of such 

 stimulus. Thus he has come to be one of the great 

 intcrnatiottal investigators, known wherever science is 

 cultivated. If we add that Sir William personally be- 

 longs to those unassuming and agreeable figures such 

 as can only be found in the small circle of the front- 

 rank men of science, and that his domestic fate, 

 though not free from occasional cares, has given him 

 a more than average degree of contentment, we have 

 stated the conditions which lead us to expect that his 

 sixtieth year of life, which he will shortly complete, 

 will not by any means mark the close of an unusually 

 rich and fruitful life's work. 



WiLHELM OSTW^ALD. 



ARCHEOLOGY IN THE ' ENCYCLOP.^DI I 



BRITANNICA." 

 Collection of Articles {loose sheets) dealing with 



Ancient History and Archaeology, from the New 



(nth) Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. 



(Cambridge University Press, n.d.) 

 T N no department of knowledge has greater pro- 

 -»• gress been made during the last twenty years 

 than in the realms of archaeology and ancient history. 

 A glance at almost any volume of the new edition 

 of the " Encyclopaedia Britannica " will bring this 

 fact forcibly home to anyone. By means of (he 

 supplementary volumes, which were issued as an 

 appendix to the tenth edition, it was attempted to 

 summarise the course of such progress, and the 

 result was certainly a series of interesting mono- 

 graphs by specialists, whose efforts were, however, 

 largely controlled and cramped by the existence of 

 articles on the same subjects in the earlier volumes, 

 which were admittedly out of date. No such dis- 

 advantage characterises the eleventh edition. In fact, 

 this new edition establishes a record of its own by 

 the simultaneous issue of the whole of its twenty- 

 eight volumes. Thus the purchaser has not to wait 

 for years for the work to be completed. On the con- 

 trary, he obtains at once a marvellous summary of 

 knowledge, every part of which has been subjected 

 to a final revision by its author at the time of going 

 to press. The amount of labour and organisation 

 which must have been required to bring such a plan 

 to a successful issue is little short of mar\ellous, and 

 the editor has certainly reason to congratulate him- 

 self on the achievement. 



His task must have been particularly arduous in 

 keeping the archaological articles abreast of the most 

 recent research. Yet in this section of the wqrk, 

 wherever we have tested it, he has not failed. Take! 

 for instance, such an article as that on .^gean civilisa- 

 tion in the first volume. Here we have an admirable 

 summary by Mr. D. G. Hogarth of the gradual dis- ' 

 NO. 2202, VOL. 88] 



covery of the remains and their distribution, and a 

 discussion of the general features of rEgcan civili-.i- 

 tion based upon them ; yet even in such a moot section 

 as that on the chronology, we find he has been 

 enabled to make use of data quite recently acquirr ' 

 The same remark applies to the series of caref 

 monographs on ancient Egypt which have been c< 

 tributed by several SF>ecialists, and to that on Bal< 

 Ionia and Assyria, the greater part of which is ium 

 the pen of Prof. .Sayce. We have mentioned th<-<' 

 three articles in particular as dealing with depar 

 ments of arch:eology in which additions to our ni.-i- 

 rial and information are being constantly made, 

 though they all occur within the earlier volumes, d ■ 

 represent the present state of our knowledge equal: 

 with those in the final volumes of the work. 



With such a wealth of material to choose from, it 

 is difficult to do more than indicate some of the mf>r' 

 important and striking features of the present editior 

 In the arrangement of the material we have noted 

 what appears to us an admirable innovation, the 

 greater weight and prominence given to the general 

 article. On one hand this enables a writer to lenti 

 additional interest to his subject by treating it from 

 a more personal and less encyclopaedic point of vie v. 

 Such an article is Mr. C. H. Read's, on archjeolog;. 

 in which he has space, not only to summarise the 

 headings of his subject, but also to discuss its value 

 as a branch of science and the progress that has been 

 made in its organised study. Thus, when dealinir 

 with the primitive epochs in the histor\- of man. >* ■ 

 note Mr. Read's timely warning to students of pri - 

 historic archaeology to use caution in their treatment 

 of that much-debated problem as to whether traces of 

 man have actually been found in deposits of the 

 Tertiary period. As Mr. Read points out, there is no 

 valid reason against the existence of Tertian.- man, 

 but the evidence in favour of the belief is not verv 

 convincing. For, on one hand, there is consider- 

 able doubt as to whether the deposits containing tl^ 

 remains are without doubt of Tertiary times; and, or, 

 the other, it is not certain whether the objects found 

 show undoubted signs of human workmanship. On 

 the latter point, a recurrent difficulty, and one which 

 can never be entirely removed, is our ignorance of 

 the precise methods of nature's working. It is certain 

 that natural forces, such as glacial action, earth- 

 quake, landslips, and the like, must crush and chip 

 flints and break up animal remains, grinding them 

 and scratching them in masses of gravel or sand. 

 It is almost impossible to separate the markings or 

 crushing of flint and bone due to such natural agen- 

 cies from others which may have been purposely made 

 by man to ser\'e some useful end. Even the one 

 feature which is commonly held to determine human 

 agency, the " bulb of percussion " (the lump or bulb 

 on the face of a flint weapon at the end where the 

 blow was delivered to detach it from the mass), is 

 not conclusive evidence; for recent investigations 

 have shown that natural forces frequently produce a 

 similar result. Mr. Read's advice in deciding knott}" 

 points of this character may be summarised : use 

 caution, and, where possible, obtain collateral evidence 

 of some kind. 



