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IN the study of any science, it is always a rewarding thing occasionally to go back and read again the great classical treatises that have provided the foundation material for the modern development of the subject.About such works there clings an indelible impression of youthful vigour and freshness, of the deployment of broad philosophical principles, in those happy days before our scientific disciplines became so bogged down in technicalities, and so overweighted by the sheer burden of accumulated fact-to the extent that the modern scientist, compelled inexorably to an ever-narrowing specialisation, is sometimes uncharitably described as knowing more and more about less and less.Moreover, the great nineteenth-century pioneers of science did not disdain to write literature, in marked contrast to the modern tendency to write jargon.Thus in archaeology, when we read about the crossfertilisation and hybridisation of Beakers; when we find old and well-established terms such as Windmill Hill and Peterborough, Hallstatt and La Tene, superseded by letters of the alphabet, or even by letters and figures in a kind of pseudo-algebraical combination; when we are told that the Larnians were 'advanced enough in technology' to cross the North Channel-in other words, they had boats-when we find two old ladies, thought to be sacrificially buried in a prehistoric hut, described, poor dears, as 'ideological lubricants'-then we begin to wonder whether the writing of books on archaeology has ceased to be an exercise in literature, and is on the fair road to becoming what a seventeenth-century critic described as 'the obfuscation of understanding'.It is for such reasons that, in my submission, every modern geologist would do well to read over again, once in a while, Lyell's Principles-or, if he be a Scot, to read and reread the splendidly eloquent writings of Hugh Miller.In the same way, the biologist of today would refresh his soul, and renew his grasp of first principles, by reading again Darwin's Origin of Species.And it is with such considerations in mind that I have the honour of inviting your attention this evening to the first great scientific study of the whole field of Scottish archaeology, from the earliest traces of human occupation in our land, down to the close of the Middle Ages.The book in question is Sir Daniel Wilson's Prehistoric Annals of Scotland, of which the second edition was published in 1863-just one hundred years ago.Hence it seemed to me that a backward glance at this famous book might be a suitable contribution to the proceedings of our Annual Meeting in this centenary year of the final form of Wilson's work.Often, in rereading a classical work on science or history, it is well to go back to the first edition.Later issues, revising, patching, darning, amending and qualifying as the weight and scope of knowledge increased, tend to lose something of their
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