Before 1918 it was believed that India's contact with the western world began about 3000 years ago with the intrusion into a barbaric peninsula of the half-legendary Vedic Aryans. It was only with the Empire of Darius that India began to figure substantially in the historical records accessible to us. In 1938 we know in the Indus valley a fully-literate and very advanced urban civilization flourishing fully fifteen centuries before the supposed date of the Aryan invasion. We know too that the ancient Indus cities were in regular and intimate contact with the Sumerian cities of Iraq; a stream of Indian manufactures flowed into Mesopotamia, Indian ideas could travel by the same channels. I need not remind you how deeply modern Western civilization is indebted to the ancient Sumerian, how many of the fundamental inventions that make civilization possible are traceable to the Tigris-Euphrates region, how intimately, through the Hebrews and the Greeks, Mesopotamian traditions have been injected into the very core of our spiritual culture. There lie the roots of our mathematics and astronomy, of the myths that, through the Bible, colour our outlook from early childhood. But we can now infer that India too contributed to the formation of the cultural tradition we thus inherit.

The accumulation of specialized work and the publication of more texts calls for the constant modification of current conceptions of the history of medieval England. Of the means of achieving this readjustment the most satisfactory is probably the lecture, which affords scope for the individual interpretation of development over a wide field and yet does not lose its flexibility or arrogate to itself an authoritative character to which, owing to its very nature, no general survey can rightly lay claim. It is not suggested that the twentieth-century medievalist should ignore the printing-press altogether, but there is much to be said for concentrating on the printing of such works-in the main, editions of texts-as may possibly be of some value to future generations of scholars. To the demand for ‘brighter’ history it is we11 to turn a deaf ear, but the exigencies of time to some extent justify the publication of re-interpretations by those competent to undertake them, whether such text-books assume the form of the co-operative work with almost every chapter from a different pen, the many-volumed history with an expert in charge of each century or so, or a general survey of one or other of the compartments into which history is commonly divided. Of these the last might be deemed the least satisfactory, for the treatment of ‘constitutional’, ‘economic’ or ‘ecclesiastical’ history as a self-contained entity may seem a vicious and outworn practice, leading inevitably to distortion.

Historians have known the ‘Gododdin’ ever since Skene's edition and translation in the Four Ancient Books of Wales (1868)' and have realized the possibility that its claim to be the work of a sixth-century British poet may be in some form true. The text however was so obscure and in parts corrupt, and hence Skene's and other translations so plainly unreliable, that few have cared to deal boldly with it. Now comes Professor Williams' life-work, his edition of and introduction to the Book of Aneirin, in which he establishes as satisfactory a text as is ever likely to be made, and solves the great majority of the difficulties of interpretation. The importance of this book cannot be overestimated, and since the whole is written in Welsh a full description is necessary.

N works on the evolution of plank-built boats attention has never been directed sufficiently to the technique of the methods followed in their construction. The universal habit has been to take the vessels as they are in their completed state and to apply morphological methods to their study from this limited aspect; precisely as the oldfashioned conchologist studied and classified his shells by outward form without regard to the soft parts—the essential criteria, as we now know. It is true nevertheless that in respect both of mollusca and boats, the study of the outward form has led, generally, to an approximation to the truth, but conclusions so reached are not to be accepted as correct without correlated verification dependent upon study of the kernel within the husk. Thus it is that nearly the same conclusions to which I come in this paper, have already been suggested tentatively by Brindley; but, owing to the fact that he did not utilize the internal evidence now brought forward, his suggestions were controversial hypotheses which he could not prove conclusively; nor was he able to state definitely whether the divergent forms noted were reached by means of diffusion and local variation, or whether they arose through independent invention, or by a combination of the two factors.

N their recent work, The Open Fields, C. S. and C. S. Orwin devote an appendix to the question of the origin of lynchets, in which they express their difficulties in accepting the current theory that narrow, step-like terraces like those at Bishopstone (Wilts.), for instance, could have been formed as a result of ploughing (PLATE I, facing p. 49). In private correspondence they assure me that these difficulties are widely shared by other agriculturalists, but at the same time they admit that they have no better explanation to offer. They point out that these terraces are found distributed mainly on the chalk of southern England, but also on various other geological formations in the Midlands, west and north, and also in southern Scotland; also that there seem to be many varieties of strip-lynchets, and that possibly one explanation may not apply to all; but while rightly distinguishing between these and the small square plots of the Celtic field-system, they are very much in error in implying that the latter are bounded only by field-banks and not by lynchets (p. 3 19).

‘This map’, the Director General informs us in his Foreword, ‘forms the northern portion of the Map of Britain in the Dark Ages, of which the southern portion was published in 1935’. It represents therefore the completion of a task which must have taken nearly a decade to carry out, from its first inception down to publication. This northern sheet is in fact a map of Early Scotland, showing it as it was roughly between the years A.D. 450 and 850; but in this dim historical dawn exact dates cannot as a rule be discerned. A long historical introduction of 26 pages, and 5 diagrams, serve to amplify and elucidate the map itself; and there is of course the usual index of place-names.

In recent years considerable attention has been devoted to the problems of the Early Iron Age in the British Isles; and, amongst these problems, that of the relationship between the insular and the continental cultures of the period has not become simpler or clearer as the British evidence has accumulated. How far, and in what manner, were the various Iron Age cultures of Britain derived from the continent? How far, and under what conditions, were they due to local initiative in Britain itself? Until questions such as these can be answered approximately, it will remain impossible alike to estimate the real achievement of the later prehistoric civilization of the island and to visualize the full significance of the adjacent civilization of northwestern Europe. The problem is not an easy one. The agricultural and therefore local basis of most of the Iron Age economy of Britain encouraged the strong local differentiation of cultural forms, and this local individuality was enhanced by the fashion in which the major tracts of open and habitable chalk or greensand tended, in ancient times, to be isolated by expanses of dense and often impassable forest. And, similarly, an intrusive element from overseas might easily take root in a particular area of southern or eastern Britain without directly affecting other areas within a relatively short map-distance.