Archceologia. 475 



archaeological science has really made great advance,"so many men 

 should prefer starting theories founded upon nothing, and that so 

 many others should throw away a great deal of ingenuity and 

 energy upon shadowy speculations which might have been turned 

 to good account. We have two examples before us. One is that 

 of an inscribed OAK beam, or lintel, over a fire-place, in the manor 

 keep at Hexham, in Northumberland. A Northumberland gentle- 

 man, with a great amount of cleverness, has made out the inscrip- 

 tion to be Anglo-Saxon of the earlier half of the twelfth century, 

 and gives an Anglo-Saxon reading of it, which would very much 

 puzzle one of our Anglo-Saxon forefathers to make anything of; 

 while any one acquainted with old English literature and manu- 

 scripts Will recognize it at once as a good well-known hand of the 

 fifteenth century. The inscription appears to consist chiefly of names 

 of men. The other example to which we allude is the now rather 

 celebrated Newton Stone, and its inscription. The late eminent Dr. 

 Mill, led aside by Oriental prejudices, read it backwards and turned 

 it into a Phoenician inscription, of an enormously early date, and 

 revealing some most marvellous information. We see that a more 

 recent writer, Dr. Moore, in a book upon the Ancient Pillar Stones of 

 Scotland, has found out that it is in "Avian characters," and has 

 given it an equally extraordinary interpretation. The stone belongs 

 to a class of monuments well known to antiquaries, which range 

 from perhaps as far back as the fourth or fifth centuries after Christ 

 to the ninth or tenth. The original is a good deal defaced, but the 

 first lines of it may easily be read, HIC IACTT (the usual form of 

 the word at this period) CONSTANTINYS .... FILIVS .... 

 The name of the father of Constantinus, and the remainder of the 

 inscription are so much rubbed that it would require a little careful 

 study to make it out, but we have no doubt that with this careful 

 study it may be done. 



The old acquaintance of all antiquaries, the Gentleman' 's Magazine, 

 has just passed into new hands, and the first number of the new 

 series will appear at the same moment with the present notice. 

 We cannot but wish it well. The Gentleman's is the patriarch of 

 English magazines. It was started so long ago as 1731, and con- 

 tinued as the most respectable member of the monthly periodical 

 press for nearly a century, being then simply a journal of general 

 literature and science. As such, it was associated with the names 

 of Dr. Samuel Johnson and Goldsmith, and many other literary 

 celebrities of the last century. It was, we believe, about or soon 

 after, the year 1830, that a more especially antiquarian character 

 was given to it, and when it passed from the house of Nichols to 

 that of Parker, it received a stronger bias towards architectural 

 antiquities, which of course made it rather more a class publication. 

 The new proprietors, Messrs. Bradbury and Evans, purpose, as we 

 understand, to restore it in some degree to its more ancient cha- 

 racter of a general journal of literature and science. We can only 

 say that we wish our old friend all success. We think, at the 

 same time, that there is now a good opening for a journal, ably 

 edited, and devoted especially to historical and antiquarian litera- 



