SECTIONAL TRANSACTIONS.— H. 359 



Dr. Felix Oswald. — Recent Excavation on the Roman Camp of Maryt- 



dunum on the Fosse Way. 



Excavation carried on for several years has revealed the fact that the Roman 

 camp of Margidunum, situated on the Fosse Way, halfway between Leicester and 

 Lincoln, was founded in the reign of Claudius, probably by Ostorius Scapula, when 

 (according to Tacitus) he built a series of frontier-forts between the Severn and the 

 Trent (i.e. along the Fosse Way) to secure his hold on the country during his advance 

 into Wales. Margidunum is rhomboidal in outline, with an area of about 7 acres, 

 and probably held a garrison of 1,000 men. It was strongly defended by as many 

 as six ditches and a wooden stockade, burnt apparently during the Boudiccan insurrec- 

 tion, when Cerialis and a remnant of cavalry of the Ninth Legion fled to Lincoln after 

 being ambushed. The camp is traversed by three parallel roads, but the headquarters 

 building is in a field not yet available for excavation. Dr. Oswald is at present 

 excavating a large bath-house on the west side of the fort, interrupting the continuity 

 of the ditches. Margidunum ceased to be of military value at the beginning of the 

 second century, and was completely dismantled, even foundations being removed ; 

 it became a mere posting-station, mentioned twice in the Antonine Itineraries. In 

 the fourth century, after Theodosius had repelled the invasion of the Picts who had 

 laid waste nearly the whole country, Margidunum was refortified by a stone wall on 

 a concrete foundation, 9 feet thick, and continued to be occupied down to the end 

 of the Roman occupation. The pottery is abundant and remarkably varied, and is 

 of great chronological value when occurring in numerous wells, sealed-up pits and 

 ditches ; it belongs to all periods, from pedestalled urns of late Celtic type in Claudian 

 wells to the imitation ' Samian ' with ' daisy ' pattern of the fourth century. 



Friday, September 2. 



Presidential Address by Prof. F. G. Paksons on The Englishman of the 

 Future. (See p. 138.) 



Sir W. Boyd Dawkins, F.R.S. — The Place of Man (Homo sapiens) in the 

 Tertiary Period. 



The study of mankind, formerly confined to history, has now been extended through 

 prehistory far back into the geological record, in which Man (Homo sapiens) is 

 the last outcome of the mammalian evolution which characterises the successive 

 stages of the Tertiary Period. In this evolution the Anthropids — universally taken 

 to be intermediates between man and the higher apes — appear in the Late Pliocene 

 or the Early Pleistocene, and apparently become extinct in Europe before the close 

 of the Pleistocene Age. 



In Europe and in Palestine they occur in association with rude stone implements 

 of the Chellean, Acheulean and Mousterean groups of the French archaeologists, a 

 fact which raises the question as to whether the whole of the Early Palaeolithic imple- 

 ments, generally assigned to man, should be referred to one or other of the anthro- 

 pids. All the reputed cases of their association with Homo sapiens which I have 

 examined turn out to be burials in later times. I should therefore answer that 

 question in the affirmative. The anthropids passed into Europe from their centres 

 of evolution in the warmer regions of Africa and Asia along with the animals now 

 living in warm climates, such as the hippopotamus. They ranged as far north as 

 Yorkshire, occupying the same hunting grounds in middle and northern Europe as 

 their successors the artists of the caves. The artist cave-dweller — the earliest re- 

 presentative of Homo sapiens in Europe — has left his remains in strata that overlie 

 those containing the implements of the anthropid hunters, and are therefore of later 

 date and proved by the associative remains to belong to the last phase of the Pleistocene. 

 He appears in Europe as an emigrant from Asia, — a well-equipped hunter highly 

 developed in bram and body and of the same physique as the Iberic or Mediterranean 

 tribes that form the basis of the present population of Europe. He found his way 

 into Britain when it was part of the Continent and lost his characteristic arts and 

 crafts during the vast period of the slow depression of the Atlantic border, which 

 created the British Isles and forms the hard-and-fast line between the Pleistocene and 

 Holocene periods. He probably was absorbed into the invading Neolithic tribes 



