BRITISH BARROWS.*
Jr a thing is worth doing at all, it is worth doing well ; therefore if our thoughts, as we close Mr. Greenwell's book on British( Barrows, are tinged with the melancholy which overshadowed the charity boy's mind, in Pickwick, when he had mastered the alpha- bet, and was doubting about the utility of his hard-won conquest, the fault is ours unquestionably, and not Mr. Greenwell's. His book purports to be "A record of the examination of sepulchral mounds in various parts of England," and we have never met with a book which more faithfully and punctiliously kept the promise of its title-page. The " record" is minute and exhaustive to the last degree, and we cannot imagine bow a line could be added to it. It is true that, owing to the necessary, and perhaps needful, recurrence of certain propositions, we are inclined at times to say, with the unwary Frenchman, who through a mistake of the binder's bought and read twenty-five copies of the first volume of a lengthy history, " Ii se r6pete quelquefois, cc monsieur-lk." But here, again, no fault is to be attributed to Mr. Green- well. Ile set himself a certain task to do, and he has done it, unflinchingly, unflaggingly, and completely. His book is the work of an enthusiastic antiquarian, is written for enthusiastic antiquarians, and by enthusiastic antiquarians alone can it be fairly and equitably judged. lie has, how- ever, prefixed to his " record " a long "introduction," describing the aim and results of his "examination," and Pro- fessor Rolleston has subjoined some "general remarks on pre- historic crania ;" but the scope and contents of a work of this. character are obviously such as, in a brief review like the present, can only be treated very generally, and we may add, only very perfunctorily. Readers who care to learn all that can be learned about the "form of barrows," the "materials of barrows," the "circles enclosing barrows," the "holes in barrows," the "flints and potsherds" that are found in barrows, the "burnt," "half-burnt," and " unburnt " bodies that are found in barrows, and in what position they are found,—readers, we repeat, who care to learn all this, and a vast deal more, about the interesting relics of dress, arms, urns, and other utensils—admirably illustrated, we may remark, in passing, by a copious series of beautifully executed drawings—will be able to gratify their curiosity, however insatiate it may be, by studying this book, and will be duly and pro- portionately grateful to the patient energy and thorough-going industry of Mr. Greenwell. Had, indeed, this gentleman been able to satisfy himself about the inferences to be drawn from his discoveries, we should have felt ourselves bound to lay those in- ferences before our readers. But Mr. Greenwell, where inferences are concerned, is as cautious as some excavators are rash, and although we feel constrained to assent to his conclusions when he comes to any, we feel, and we venture to think that be will agree- with us—nay, he has almost said the same thing, in as many words —that the time has not yet come when a final verdict can be pro- nounced upon the historical lesson which his discoveries—if we could read them right—would teach us. As we have confessed that we cannot treat this book otherwise than in a perfunctory way, and have recommended it, as we honestly and earnestly can, as a serious and earnest work, which well deserves to be studied • British Barrows. By William Oreetwell, ALA., F.S.A. Oxford: Clarendet Press. 1877.
by serious and earnest readers, Mr. Greenwell, we trust, will forgive us if, in the few general remarks which we feel called upon to make, we are occasionally betrayed into expressing ourselves with more levity than his book or his subject may seem to deserve "That the bones of Theseus," says Sir Thomas Browne, in the
'epistle dedicatory to that Hydriotaphia of his, in which lie things more curious by far than were ever found in urn or tomb, "that the bones of Theseus should be seen again in Athens was not beyond conjecture and hopeful expectation, but that these should arise so opportunely to serve yourself" (the knight of Norwich is addressing his worthy and honoured friend, Thomas Le Gros, of Crostwick, Esquire), "was an hit of fate, and honour beyond pre- diction." In a similar strain, we may say to Mr. Greenwell, "That the bones of Agamemnon "—but of course we need not complete the sentence. All that we mean is that the interest excited by the discoveries at Mycenm will naturally attract attention to the investigations of the English antiquary. How great may be the light which it is possible that the latter will throw upon the former, may be inferred from the fact that Mr. Greenwell has to meet difficulties connected with imperfectly burnt and imperfectly arranged skeletons, very similar to some of those which met Dr. Schliemann. So far as the imperfect arrangement or disarrangement of the bones is concerned, Mr. Greenwell appears to lean decidedly to the explanation which "secondary interments," as he calla them, offer. But why some bodies are found burnt, and others half-burnt, and others not burnt at all, is a mystery which he does not attempt to solve. He notices, of course, the varying practice of the Greeks and Romans, and be feels, as keenly as we do, that vague coincidences of this kind count for little, when the practices compared are those of nations in different stages of civilisation. In one of his notes he adduces a very curious custom of the Curumbalen, which has amused us and will probably amuse our readers. These Curumbalen, who are a slave caste, and worship the hill-god (Malai-deva) and the spirits of deceased ancestors, burn their dead, if good men, and bury them, if bad ; the latter becoming demons, and re- quiring to be conciliated by sacrifice. The proportion of bodies, in Mr. Greenwell's barrows, if we understand him rightly, was about three unburnt to two burnt. It would be rash to draw too strict an inference from this as to the comparative morality of our ancestors, but Mr. Greenwell seems to have no doubt that for some purpose or other sacrifices were not uncommonly offered at burials. A graver difficulty arises in connection with the dis- proportionate number of flints and potsherds, which are found so constantly and abundantly in the barrows, and which, again, remind us of Blycenw. A very apt quotation from Hamlet only serves to increase the difficulty,—
" For charitable prayers,
Shards, flints, and pebbles should be thrown at her ;" unless, indeed, we accept Mr. Greenwell's suggestion, which we would unhesitatingly, only he appears to have no confidence in it himself, and we cannot help saying that Mr. Greenwell is almost too cautious and timid in his opinions, or rather, we should say, in the expression of his opinions. The fault, if indeed it be a fault, is a rare one, especially among antiquarians, and if it leaves us occasionally a little wistful and dubious about "the conclusion of the whole matter," it stands out in such pleasant contrast to the audacious insensibility of robust ignor- ance, that although we began by blaming, we must end by praising it. We are extremely glad to hear that Mr. Greenwell's labour of years (and of love) has brought him many happy hours and pleasurable associations. Old friendships, he tells us, have ripened and new ones have grown over the graves of the ancient dead, and there is no part of his life which he can look back to with less of regret and more satisfaction than that which has been passed in an endeavour to revive, in however faint a form, the almost-forgotten past. "Old Mantuan ! old Mantuan !" we are inclined to say, "who understandeth thee not, loves thee not ;" at all events, we can with perfect friendliness (con la bocca dolce) take leave of Mr. Greenwell.
We have but a short space left wherein to notice Professor Rolleston's essay. It is, in its way, as painstaking and exhaus- tive as Mr. Greenwell's record. But the style in which it is written is hardly so easy. We must bow, we suppose, to the exigencies of science, but we confess that we cannot read such a sentence as the one we are about to quote without feeling a decided tendency to become " macro-gnathous " ourselves :— "The true rationale "—so runs this sentence—" of the persist- ence of the frontal suture would appear to be that it is a teleo- logical accommodation to the needs of the enlarging brain of an advancing civilisation, with which enlargement is correlated a diminution of the size of the jaws, and of the necessity for the rotation of the brain and the frontal bone backward which has been often noted here as occurring in macro-gnathotta men, and which is carried out still further in the villainously low foreheads' of the apes." We do not know whether this was "easy writing ;" it is certainly hardish reading. We hope, however, that it is not a mere spirit of dilettante Philistinism which makes us doubt whether the large and sweeping generalisations implied in the above quotation are much supported by the elaborate cir- cumstantiality of too many of Professor Rolleston's details. It is fair to add that these details are lit up at times by flashes of humour, as when the Professor, for instance, opines that the entire obsolescence of the wisdom-teeth is more common among women than among men ; and quotes Mr. Franks's description of the change which took place in the national symbol, on Roman civilisation being introduced, from a gaunt, lean animal, into "a well-conditioned boar, of a natural form and in a classical attitude." And a propos of this phrase, may we not ask whether the Professor's attitude is not itself a little too classical, when he quotes two Greek hexameters to show, as be rather alarmingly puts it, that "the relations of the Aletstelidm to the Rodentia gener- ally" is accurately expressed in the Batrachomyomachia We are willing to believe that weasels are the natural enemies of rabbits, without any appeal to " authority " on such a matter of "opinion." It is natural enough that in the investiga- tion of facts like those which have occupied the attention of Mr. Greenwell and Professor Rolleston, queries should abound much more plentifully than answers, but we venture to suggest an explana- tion of one difficulty that has been raised about a curious statement made by Cmsar and quoted by Professor Rolleston. Our ancestors, according to their invader, " Leporem et gallinam et anserem gustare fas non putant, haec tamen alunt animi voluptatisque causa." All kinds of suggestions have been made to explain why "hare, and fowl, and goose," which modern Britons find so eatable, were forbidden meats to ancient Britons. The explanation is so simple, that we are almost ashamed to make it. Men of the Latin races—Italians and Spaniards, as well as Frenchmen—are notoriously bad interpreters of the habits and customs of their Teutonic fellow-men. We have no doubt whatever that Ctesar's statement was the result of "pure ignorance,"—a mere blunder, generically the same, if not quite so ludicrous in its absurdity, as the imaginative Frenchman's assertion that while staying in London, he had been driven on a Sunday afternoon round the Tower in a cab drawn by a horse that had three times won the Derby. It is possible, we may add, that the "cruces" in the Germany of Tacitus, which have so sorely tried the patience and temper of archteologists, may admit of a similarly easy solution ; and we are led to believe that they may, because the great historian, in his account of the Jews, where we can more easily check him, has proved how easy it is for a " Latin " observer to err in discussing the manners and customs of an alien race. Whether any similar, or remotely similar, explanation may help to strengthen or weaken the evolution hypothesis, which Professor Rolleston's industry labours to support, "were a query," as Sir Thomas Browne says, "too sad to insist on."
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