CORRESPONDING SOCIETIES 591 
one hand, the unprecedented extent of the work, particularly field-work, 
now being carried out in Great Britain both by central and by local 
archzological societies ; and he appealed, on the other hand, for a greater 
co-ordination of this work and for a more fitly proportioned distribution 
of energy over the whole field of study. Incidentally, he pointed out 
certain specific directions in which current research was overcrowded and 
others in which progress had been unduly retarded. 
Before we consider the ways and means whereby a reasonable policy of 
the kind can be implemented, let us glance at some of the causes of the 
present inequality of effort in the province with which I am, for the moment, 
concerned. It will, I think, be found that parallel causes are in greater 
or less degree the basis of similar difficulties in other branches of science. 
In archeology, we are at the present time approaching the end of a 
transitional phase. A generation or two ago, the science—then only 
partially scientific in method—was still essentially an amateur accomplish- 
ment. As such, it was widely cultivated by the country gentry, who formed 
the nucleus of most of our learned societies. Some of the research carried 
out under these conditions was surprisingly good; much of it, less 
surprisingly, bad. But whatever the value of this work in detail, it had— 
and, so far as it continues, still has—one outstanding and overwhelming 
merit. If it did not necessarily create a scientific understanding of 
archzology, it at least established and maintained a widespread sympathy 
for that study, and so, more than any other factor, prepared the way for 
the next great advance. 
That advance is best symbolised by the inauguration of centralised State 
effort. The first symptom of the new order, in this country, was the passing 
in 1882 of the first Ancient Monuments Act, giving the government slight 
and nebulous powers for the preservation of certain classes of antiquities. 
I describe this primitive Act as nebulous. It was, indeed, a cloud no bigger 
than a man’s hand. It had behind it, however, though not in this country, 
a significance out of all relation to its initial size. As long ago as the second 
half of the eighteenth century, the great Gustavus III of Sweden had 
instituted a State inquiry into the antiquities of that country. We need not 
inquire too closely into his motives, which were perhaps as mixed as those 
which have induced another autocratic statesman of more recent days to 
expose and to advertise the grandeur of Rome. But the Swedish example 
has been taken up during the past century in France, Germany, Spain and, 
recently, in Ireland, to an extent that enables us to regard a considerable 
measure of State control in matters archeological as a normal function of 
a civilised country at the present time. 
In Great Britain, the protoplasmic Ancient Monuments Act of 1882 
has grown successively into the Acts of 1913 and 1931, and has incidentally 
brought into being the three Royal Commissions which are now busily 
engaged upon recording the ancient and historic structures of England, 
Scotland and Wales. The growth of the Ancient Monuments Department 
of H.M. Office of Works, which administers the Act, and of the three 
Royal Commissions is a factor of primary importance in our problem in so 
far as it is concerned with this particular study. 
Its importance is this. With the parallel but more reluctant growth 
of museum organisation, it has created a nucleus of what may best be 
called professional archeology. It might be argued that the emergence 
of archeology as a science and its emergence as a profession are really one 
and the same thing. One may, indeed, claim archeology as the youngest 
of the sciences, and, if only for that reason, you will, I trust, forgive me for 
devoting an unconscionable share of my remarks to it. 
