PRESIDENT S ADDRESS. 7 



specially valuable results. The work at Corbridge, the ancient 

 Corstopitum, begun in 1906, and continued down to the autumn of 

 1914, has already uncovered throughout a great part of its area the 

 largest urban centre — civil as well as military in character — on the line 

 of the Wall, and the principal store-base of its stations. Here, together 

 with well-built granaries, workshops, and barracks, and such records of 

 civic life as are supplied by sculptured stones and inscriptions, and the 

 double discovery of hoards of gold coins, has come to light a spacious 

 and massively constructed stone building, apparently a military store- 

 house, worthy to rank beside the bridge-piers of the North Tyne, among 

 the most imposing monuments of Eoman Britain. There is much 

 here, indeed, to carry our thoughts far beyond our insular limits. On 

 this, as on so many other sites along the Wall, the inscriptions and 

 reliefs take us very far afield. We mark the grave-stone of a man of 

 Palmyra, an altar ol the Tyrian Hercules — its Phcenician Baal — a 

 dedication to a pantheistic goddess of Syrian religion and the rayed 

 effigy of the Persian Mithra. So, too, in the neighbourhood of New- 

 castle itself, as elsewhere on the Wall, there was found an altar 

 of Jupiter Dolichenus, the old Anatolian God of the Double Axe, the 

 male form of the divinity once worshipped in the prehistoric Labyrinth 

 of Crete. Nowhere are we more struck than in this remote extremity 

 of the Empire with the heterogeneous religious elements, often drawn 

 from its far Eastern borders, that before the days of the final advent of 

 Christianity, Eoman dominion had been instrumental in diffusing. The 

 Orontes may be said to have flowed into the Tyne as well as the Tiber. 



I have no pretension to follow up the various affluents merged in the 

 later course of Greco-Eoman civilisation, as illustrated by these and 

 similar discoveries throughout the Eoman Woi'ld. My own recent 

 researches have been particularly concerned with the much more ancient 

 cultural stage — that of prehistoric Crete — which leads up to the Greco- 

 Eoman, and which might seem to present the problem of origins at any 

 rate in a less complex shape. The marvellous Minoan civilisation that 

 has there come to light shows that Crete of four thousand years ago 

 must unquestionably be regarded as the birth-place of our European 

 civilisation in its higher form. 



But are we, even then, appreciably nearer to the fountain-head? 



A new and far more remote vista has opened out in recent years, 

 and it is not too much to say that a wholly new standpoint has been 

 gained from which to survey the early history of the human race. The 

 investigations of a brilliant band of prehistoric archaeologists, with the 

 aid of representatives of the sister sciences of Geology and Palagon- 

 tology, have brought together such a mass of striking materials as to 

 place the evolution of human art and appliances in the last Quaternary 

 Period on a far higher level than had even been suspected previously. 



