Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/113

 REVIEWS.

previous volumes of General Pitt-Rivers’ record of his excavations on and in the neighbourhood of his property at Rushmore have been described and reviewed in The Archæological Review, vol. ii., p. 377, and in Folk-Lore, vol. iv., p. 239. Readers of those reviews and of the volumes themselves know and (the latter especially) appreciate the extreme, if not unparalleled, and exhaustive care with which the excavations were conducted, the magnificence with which they have been recorded, and the learning and skill with which the results were discussed. All these qualities, it is needless to say, are abundantly illustrated in the new volume before us.

It opens with an address delivered at Dorchester in August, 1897, to the Archæological Institute, containing a summary account of the explorations and a consideration of some of the chief problems involved in the discoveries. These are preceded by a reply to strictures by the late Sir J. W. Dawson on some flints of palæolithic type obtained by General Pitt-Rivers in the stratified gravel of Gebel Assart, near Thebes, in Egypt, and on his report of them contained in the eleventh volume of the Journal of the Anthropological Institute. The motive of these strictures was the supposed necessity to uphold what General Pitt-Rivers refers to as “the so-called chronology of the Bible.” Although they had been made so far back as 1884 at the Victoria Institute, they had never been communicated to the finder of the flints, who was left in ignorance of them, and consequently of the opportunity of replying to them, for a dozen years. The reply,