ADDEESS 



BY 



SIR ARTHUR EVANS, D.Litt., LL.D., P.S.A., F.R.S., 



EXTBAOEDINARY PbOFEBSOR OF PbeHISTOBIC ARCHEOLOGY, OxFORD, 

 CORRESPONDANT DE l'InSTITDT DE FrANCE, ETC., 



PRESIDENT. 



New Archceological lights on the Origins of Civilisation in Eiirope: its 

 Magdalenian forermmers in the South-West and Mgean Cradle. 



El quasi cursores vital lampada tradunt. 



When I was asked on behalf of the Council of the British Association 

 to occupy the responsible post of President at the Meeting in this great 

 city — the third that has taken place here — I was certainly taken by 

 surprise; the more so as my own subject of research seemed somewhat 

 removed from what may be described as the central interests of your 

 body. The turn of Archaeology, however, I was told, had come round 

 again on the rota of the sciences represented ; nor could I be indifferent 

 to the fact that the last Presidential Address on this theme had been 

 delivered by my father at the Toronto Meeting of 1897. 



Still, it was not till after considerable hesitation that I accepted 

 the honour. Engaged as I have been through a series of years in the 

 work of excavation in Crete — a work which involved not only the 

 quarrying but the building up of wholly new materials and has entailed 

 the endeavour to classify the successive phases of a long, continuous 

 story — absorbed and fascinated by my own investigations — I am 

 oppressed with the consciousness of having been less able to keep pace 

 with the progress of fellow explorers in other departments or to do 

 sufficient justice to their results. I will not dwell, indeed, on those 

 disabilities that result to myself from present calls and the grave pre- 

 occupations of the hour, that to a greater or less extent must affect 

 us all. 



But Archaeology — the research of ancient civilisations — when the 

 very foundations of our own are threatened by the New Barbarism ! 

 The investigation of the ruins of the Past — at a time when Hell seems 

 to have been let loose to strew our Continent with havoc beyond the 

 dreams of Attila ! ' The Science of the Spade ' — at a moment when 



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