110 NOTES.
our very midst. As every road led to Rome and every stream flows
to the sea, so every branch of study leads to the great ocean of truth.
" If thou art worn and hard beset
With sorrows that thou wouldst forget;
If thou wouldst read a lesson that will keep
Thy heart from fainting and thy soul from sleep,
Go to the woods and hills ! No tears
Dim the sweet look that Nature wears."
As I have before hinted, our own special pursuits are not difficult;
we merely require common sense, with accuracy of observation and
correctness of discrimination, to make a first-class naturalist. One
such man, Sir John Lubbock, in his "Pleasures of Life" (chapter ix.
of which contains most valuable testimony, if such be needed, from
varied sources on the blessing of science), expresses his own opinion
that "it is altogether a mistake to regard science as dry, difficult, or
prosaic; much of it is as easy as it is interesting....... In
endless aspects science is as wonderful and interesting as a fairy
tale . . . and gradually we may hope that the love of science—the
'notes we sound upon the strings of nature'—will become to us
more and more, as already it is to many, a faithful and sacred
element of human feeling." By virtue of my office as President, I
hereby command you to assist towards this consummation so
devoutly to be wished. Hereof fail not.
The Danger of Bias in Archaeological Investigations.—"I have
endeavoured to keep up in the present volume the minute attention to detail with
which the investigation commenced. Much of what is recorded may never prove
of further use, but even in the case of such matter, superfluous precision may be
regarded as a fault on the right side. ... A good deal of the rash and hasty
generalization of our time arises from the unreliability of the evidence upon which
it is based. It is next to impossible to give a continuous narrative of any archaeo-
logical investigation that is entirely free from bias ; undue stress will be laid upon
facts that seem to have an important bearing upon theories that are current at the
time, whilst others that might come to be considered of greater value afterwards
are put in the background or not recorded, and posterity is endowed with a legacy
of error that can never be rectified. But when fulness and accuracy are made the
chief subject of study, this evil is in great measure avoided." . . . Exca-
vators, as a rule, record only those things which appear to them important at the
time, but fresh problems in archeology and anthropology are constantly arising,
and it can hardly failed to have escaped the notice of anthropologists, especially
those who, like myself, have been concerned with the morphology of art, that, on
turning back to old accounts in search of evidence, the points which would have
been most valuable have been passed over from being thought uninteresting at the
time. Every detail should, therefore, be recorded in the manner most conducive
to facility of reference, and it ought at all times to be the chief object of an exca-
vator to reduce his own personal equation to a minimum."—General Pitt-Rivers,
F.R.S., in the prefaces to volumes i and ii of "Excavations in Cranborne Chase."