10 



The Thirty-Fourth General Meeting. 



investigations. Iloarc speaks of Wiltshire, in his preface, as a 

 country little known and hitherto nn described, and there can be no 

 doubt that as a topographer he fulfilled his task admirably. He 

 was sound in principle, and where he failed was through not applying 

 his principles more thoroughly. He correctly established the se- 

 quence of the different modes of interment, pronouncing inhumation 

 in a contracted position to be the earliest, after which inhumation 

 was practised conjointly with cremation, and inhumation in an ex- 

 tended position he proved to be the latest mode of interment, but 

 he failed to distinguish in some cases between Saxon and late Celtic 

 burials. He distinguished primary from secondary interments in 

 the same tumulus, and he correctly classified the three kinds of urns 

 found in the graves as funereal urns, drinking vessels, and incense 

 cups ; but he described bronze dagger blades as lance heads, and, by 

 that means, led Sir Samuel Meyrick into error in his work on the 

 weapons and costume of the Ancient Britons, published in 1815. 

 He claims with justice to be the first, with Mr. Cunnington, to 

 take notice of the sites of British villages, and he attempted to 

 classify the camps and earthworks by the size of their ramparts and 

 external appearance, but his examination of them was cursory and 

 insufficient for his conclusions. But where he failed totally was in 

 neglecting to take any notice of the skeletons found in the graves. 

 The scientific study of human osteology had not commenced in his 

 time, and his mind was a blank upon all anthropological subjects. 

 He thought it right to re-inter them quickly without measuring 

 them. Here and there we find them spoken of only as the skeleton 

 of a stout person or a tall person, and in only one instance he 

 describes a skeleton, saying that * it grinned horribly a ghastly 

 smile, a singularity that I have never before noticed/ No doubt 

 the skeleton must have been laughing at him for his unscientific 

 method of dealing with it, and when we think of the large amount 

 of racial evidence that he destroyed in this way, and the compara- 

 tively small number of skeletons that have remained in the barrows 

 to be examined since, it is almost enough to give any lover of 

 antiquity a ghastly smile. Sir Richard Hoare's researches were 

 followed by those of Dean Merewether, which were published in 



