Dura is one of the buried cities which has swum into our ken since the end of the Some paintings accidentally uncovered by a British officer first led D Breasted to the site. He was followed by Cumont and in 1928 a large expedition under Professor Rostovtzeff was sent there by Yale University and the French Academy of Inscriptions. By 1937 about one third of the site had been excavated and work was suspended through lack of funds.

Dura has been compared with Pompeii but it would be hard to imagine two places more dissimilar in appearance and history. Unlike Pompeii, Dura is a grim looking site : its most striking features are the west wall on the desert side and the citadel above the Euphrates, both built of dull grey gypsum blocks : between them stretches a waste of mud brick walls. And its history covers a far longer period. Once the site of a small oriental village, it was converted by the Macedonians into a strong-point on the road between Antioch on the Orontes and Seleucia on the Tigris ; the date of its foundation is not known, but Seleucus I was regarded as the founder and it must have been about 300 B.C.

It is hardly necessary to remind readers of ANTIQUITY of the importance which environmental studies have assumed in archaeology. Since the pioneer work of Crawford and Williams-Freeman in 1912–15 we have become increasingly aware of environment. As a body we are (at least in theory) clay-land-and-damp-oakwood-conscious; we approach no problem of field archaeology without a hopeful eye on the geological map and our idea of its implications.

If sometimes we have held our beliefs in too simple faith, that in the beginning was an excusable fault. In the early days generalizations which saw things in their least complicated form were—and for that matter still are—valuable. Heavy clay-land=damp oakwood and marsh unsuited for settlement and therefore avoided; light soils=open land much sought after by early man. The jargon comes readily to us, and remains no less true, for those whose purpose is generalization, for the facility with which it is uttered.

A Considerable literature has grown up in an attempt to interpret the Lives of the Celtic Saints. It is, however, concerned almost exclusively with hagiological, textual and literary problems and very little attempt has been made to appreciate the part played by these pioneers in determining the pattern of settlement and culture reflected in the earliest written accounts of native Welsh society.

If we accept the view held by most students of the Celtic church that ancient churches and chapels now bearing the names of Celtic Saints owe their foundation in the first instance to the fact that the saint in question, or one of his immediate followers, actually visited the site and established thereon a small religious community which became the forerunner of the modern church, then, by plotting on a map all the churches known to be, or to have been, dedicated to a particular saint, we possess at once a readily available means of studying both the extent of a saint's influence—the distribution of his cult—and, at the same time, the relationship of his churches to relief and to other elements in the physical and cultural environment. This approach has, in addition, the further advantage of allowing the investigator to be independent of the entirely unsatisfactory material preserved in the Lives of the various saints, the vast majority of which were written in the 12th century, several hundreds of years after the events they purport to describe, by Norman monks eager to re-orientate local legends to their own particular theological and ecclesiastical prejudices.

CARAUSIUS, our British Emperor, has not been too badly served by commentators. He first attracted the wayward and erratic genius of Stukeley, (I) then, after a long C interval, the solid and devoted labours of Webb. (2) Of Stukeley little can be retained beyond a handful of brilliant guesses. Webb, on the other hand, has laid the foundations of a ‘ Corpus ’ of the coinage and has succeeded in stating most of the problems of the reign and solving many of them. But still there is room for a history of Carausius, in which the very scanty literary evidence shall be reinforced by the evidence of the coins, when the pure gold has been extracted from the masses of rough ore. There is perhaps not a very great deal to add to Webb's materials, but a great deal of sorting remains to be done. Included in his lists are many coins of a more or less barbarous character—ancient, but the product of no regular mint. Inside each mint, the order of mint-marks must be established and the types classified under them ; only so can we venture to interrogate the types for their meaning. Here is a task of great interest and promise for a young scholar. No disparagement of Webb's fine work is implied. Books as good as his ought to have progeny.

The tract of country bordering on the area of the Anzio beach-head, part of the wider Roman Campagna, stretching from the confines of Ardea to the banks of the T Tiber, is the scene of the dramatic action of the last six books of the Aeneid, the field of strife whereon is played to its finish the struggle for the foundation of the Roman race, and for the birth of Rome. On this soil still remain the Vergilian city of Ostia, which lies near the Tiber's mouth and was the port of Rome in antiquity, of Ardea and Lavinium, ancient settlements standing on the last seaward tufa ridge of the Alban massif and having their origin in the early Iron Age, and of Laurentum, the site of which was early lost in classical times, and cannot yet be located with any certainty.

‘To travel hopefully’ says Robert Louis Stevenson ‘is a better thing than to arrive’: and whoever would track a legend to its source must needs be an optimistic traveller, for his prospects of reaching his destination are remote. The man who indulges in this form of sport—and it has its fascinations—soon becomes aware that amid the records of the Ancients, which form his Happy Hunting-ground, inaccuracy and credulity abound; whereas dependable facts are few and far between. Somewhere or other a story starts—the narration of some actual incident or spectacle outside the common run. It passes from mouth to mouth, amassing a gradual increment of falsehood as it goes; until, by the time it crystallizes into legend it has become a fabrication inseparable from fiction, except perhaps for the survival within it of some chance and apparently superfluous detail, which gives us a clue to its origin and to the incident which give it birth.

Close acquaintance with the geographical situation of the ancient sites of Iraq, and also of the Indus Valley, inevitably leaves two questions to haunt the mind. C Why did early man choose such inconvenient and inaccessible places, as many of them now are, for his settlements when he gave up nomad life ? And why after a site had been deliberately chosen for a city was it so frequently abandoned, though its occupation might already have extended through several centuries ?

These questions were first brought home to the writer in vivid fashion by a visit twenty years ago to the lonely and insignificant little mounds of Jemdet Nasr, some twenty-five miles from the ruins of Babylon and about halfway across the wide unin- habited desert between the lower Euphrates and Tigris rivers.

Aerial reconnaissance and photography are of great importance in the study of the early history of Fenland and the surrounding country, conditions often being A very suitable for this method of investigation. A vast amount of information which can be recorded easily by air-photography, would only be obtained with the greatest difficulty, if at all, by field-work on the ground. The present paper is a brief record of observations made while flying over the fen basin during the course of duty. Unfortunately photography was not practicable, but systematic notes were kept of everything observed. Further work should reveal much more.