The President's Address. 



15 



a breadth index as low as 69, forty skulls from the chambered long 

 barrows of Gloucestershire had the somewhat higher index of 71, 

 and these, he considered, afforded evidence of a mixture of tribes ; 

 although 7 1 is a longer skull than that of any existing European 

 people. He thought the chambered long barrows showed by their 

 contents that they continued to be used by the aboriginal tribes up 

 to and within the Roman era, and the plain bowl barrow also, he 

 believed, to belong to the aboriginal tribes ; whilst the bell-shaped 

 and disc-shaped barrows he thought were the graves of the Belgse. 

 It is evident, therefore, that we must not lose sight of these two 

 distinct races in our investigations into the relics of the Romanised 

 Britons, and the district immediately to the west of where we are 

 now assembled appears to be that which is likely to be most fruitful 

 in evidence relating to that period. As we go westward from 

 Salisbury to Blandford, we pass over a region which on two separate 

 lines of evidence may be regarded as an ancient ethnical frontier. 

 Here, by the investigations of Dr. Beddoe and others into the 

 physical conditions of the existing population, we begin to come 

 upon traces of the short dark-haired people whom he believes to be 

 the survivors of the earliest wave of Britons. My own measure- 

 ments of the present inhabitants of the district confirm this opinion. 

 Here also, in the neighbourhood of Woodyates, we cross the western 

 boundary of the region of bell and disc-shaped barrows, which Dr. 

 Thurnam believed to be the graves of the Belgae, and pass over to 

 the region of the bowl" shaped barrows, containing inferior relics,' 

 which he conjectures to have belonged to the aboriginal Durotriges, 

 and the twenty-one barrows which I have opened at Rushmore, 

 to the west of this boundary line, have all been found to be bowl 

 barrows, or bowl barrows with a ditch round them, which Thurnam 

 thought to be a later combination of the bowl and bell- shaped 

 forms. It is a position which, probably owing to the extent of 

 dense forest to the west and south in prehistoric times, has always 

 afforded a standing point for the earliest races in resisting the en- 

 roachments of succeeding waves of migration from the east. Here, 

 ox hereabouts, Professor Rhys has shown that the Goidels, or first 

 wave of the Celts, for some time contended against the Brythons, 



