LIFE OF DR. ROLLESTON. xlv 



trated his experience by a story he had heard of a famous row 

 in the Dublin Theatre. A man in the gallery had got another in 

 his arms and was in the act of pitching him over, when a voice 

 from below was heard to cry, 'Don't waste the man, kill a 

 fiddler wid him.' ' So I never throw away a fact,' the Professor 

 moralised, ' it is sure to have its use somewhere.' One practical 

 good gained by many-sided sympathies and tastes was in the 

 effect he had in stimulating those who came to see him at the 

 Museum ; they would go away with new interests implanted in 

 them, and often, especially when they were stationed or travel- 

 ling in distant countries, they would do useful scientific work. 

 All over the world he had friends eagerly collecting specimens 

 for him. His sympathy with missionaries stood him in good 

 stead in this way, and much friendly intercourse arose, as for 

 instance with Mr. Whitmee the missionary and philologist, who 

 became acquainted with him through a specimen of the Didun- 

 culus strigirostris, the nearest living relative of the Dodo, and 

 which now inhabits the same case with the skeleton of that 

 famous bird. 



In the line of Anthropology, his chief publication was his part 

 of Greenwell and Rolleston's 'British Barrows 1 .' The two 

 friends had spent many delightful days on the Yorkshire 

 wolds, searching the burial-mounds of ancient chiefs on the 

 wild moors and ferny hill-sides where they have as yet escaped 

 destruction at the hands of the ditcher and the ploughman. 

 Canon Greenwell devoted himself especially to the archaeological 

 objects found, and Dr. Rolleston to the human remains. He 

 considered the collection of skulls figured in the volume to 

 confirm the easily remembered rule that the long barrows of 

 the stone age were the graves of a long-skulled people then 

 dwelling in the land. In burial-mounds of later times, generally 

 round, remains of men of both narrow and wide type of skull 



1 British Barrows : a Record of the Examination of Sepulchral Mounds in 

 various parts of England, by William Greenwell, M.A., F.S.A.; together with De- 

 scription of Figures of Skulls, General Remarks on Prehistoric Crania, and an 

 Appendix, by George Rolleston, M.D., F.R.S. Oxford (Clarendon Press), 1877. 



