The President's Address. 



11 



the Salisbury volume of the Institute in 1849. He improved 

 somewhat upon Sir Richard's method by measuring the thigh bones 

 of some of the skeletons, but without arriving at any results as to 

 race or stature. He also roughly measured two skulls of oxen found 

 in the tumuli, which was also an advance upon Sir Richard, who 

 did no more in the way of describing one or two of those he found 

 than by saying that in the opinion of a butcher of his acquaintance 

 some of them were the largest of the kind that he had seen. No 

 systematic measurements of the bones of animals with a view to 

 the comparison of domesticated breeds appears to have been made 

 until Professor Rolleston and Professor Boyd Dawkins applied their 

 biological knowledge to the inquiry. In my most recent investiga- 

 tions into the Romano-British villages near Rushmore, I have en- 

 deavoured to improve upon this by establishing, with the approval 

 of Professor Moseley, F.R.S., and Dr. Garson, of the Royal College 

 of Surgeons, a regular scale of measurements by means of which 

 we shall be able, from a single bone or fragment of skull, to 

 ascertain approximately the size and some of the peculiarities of 

 the domesticated breeds in use by the ancient Britons. But an 

 entirely new era in prehistoric archaeology was to be inaugurated 

 by methods imported from other sciences. Whilst geology was to 

 carry us back to periods that had not before been thought of in the 

 history of man, anthropology was to teach us how to estimate the 

 stature and physical peculiarities of the skeletons found in the 

 graves, and ethnology was to enable us to appreciate the social and 

 material condition of the aborigines of our country by a comparison 

 of their relics with the arts of modern savages. All these branches 

 have now become indispensable for the prehistorian. Dr. Thurnam 

 was the first to apply anthropology to the elucidation of our Wiltshire 

 barrows, and his papers are included amongst the earliest contribu- 

 tions to the newly-established Anthropological Society in 1865-7. 

 Profiting by the contemporary researches of Professors Thomsen 

 and Nilsson in Scandinavia, and those of Canon Greenwell in the 

 Yorkshire Wolds, he systematised the results of Sir Richard Hoare's 

 investigations, and separated the tumuli more definitely into those 

 of the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages, which began to be finally 



