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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XLIV. No. 1134 



abiding records. The basis of methodical 

 study was here the survey of the Wall 

 carried out, together with that of its main 

 military approach, the Watling Street, by 

 MacLauchlan, under the auspices of Alger- 

 non, fourth Duke of Northumberland. 

 And who, however lightly touching on 

 such a theme, can overlook the services of 

 the late Dr. Collingwood Bruce, the Grand 

 Old Man, not only of the Wall itself, but of 

 all pertaining to border antiquities, dis- 

 tinguished as an investigator for his scholar- 

 ship and learning, whose lifelong devotion 

 to his subject and contagious enthusiasm 

 made the Roman Wall, as it had never been 

 before, a household word? 



New points of view have arisen, a stricter 

 method and a greater subdivision of labor 

 have become imperative in this as in other 

 departments of research. We must, there- 

 fore, rejoice that local explorers have more 

 and more availed themselves of the co- 

 operation, and welcomed the guidance of 

 those equipped with comparative knowledge 

 drawn from other spheres. The British 

 Vallum, it is now realized, must be looked 

 at with perpetual reference to other fron- 

 tier lines, such as the Germanic or the 

 Rhffitian lines ; local remains of every kind 

 have to be correlated with similar discov- 

 eries throughout the length and breadth of 

 the Roman Empire. 



This attitude in the investigation of the 

 remains of Roman Britain — the promotion 

 of which owes so much to the energy and 

 experience of Professor Haverfield — has in 

 recent years conducted excavation to spe- 

 cially valuable results. The work at Cor- 

 bridge, 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 

 center — civil as well as military in char- 

 acter — on the line of the Wall, and the 

 principal store-base of its stations. Here, 



together with well-built granaries, work- 

 shops, and barracks, and such records of 

 civic life as are supplied by sculptured 

 stones and inscriptions, and the double dis- 

 covery of hoards of gold coins, has come 

 to light a spacious and massively con- 

 structed stone building, apparently a mili- 

 tary storehouse, worthy to rank beside the 

 bridge-piers of the North Tyne, among the 

 most imposing monuments of Roman Bri- 

 tain. 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 of the Tyrian 

 Hercules — its Pho2nician Baal — a dedica- 

 tion to a pantheistic goddess of Syrian reli- 

 gion and the rayed effigy of the Persian 

 Mithra. So, too, in the neighborhood of 

 Newcastle itself, as elsewhere on the Wall, 

 there was found an altar of Jupiter Doli- 

 chenus, the old Anatolian God of the 

 Double Axe, the male form of the divinity 

 once worshipped in the prehistoric Laby- 

 rinth 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, Roman 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-Roman civilization, as illustrated 

 by these and similar discoveries throughout 

 the Roman World. My own recent re- 

 searches have been particularly concerned 

 with the much more ancient cultural stage 

 — that of prehistoric Crete — which leads up 

 to the Greco-Roman, and which might seem 

 to present the problem of origins at any 

 rate in a less complex shape. The marvel- 



