Book Description:
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: is given to written records, little has been done by Government for our unwritten records, our ancient monuments. Almost every effort in this direction that has hitherto been attempted has been by private persons or learned societies, but their work has necessarily been imperfect, and without concert, and on no definite plan or system. The number of such monuments is even more limited than the documentary, and, considering the long period to which they relate, are comparatively far fewer in number. If one disappears or is destroyed, it is a loss that cannot be repaired, and hardly a week passes that we do not hear of some relic of antiquity perishing through neglect, or by mistake or design.1 It is high time, therefore, that active steps should be taken to ascertain and register such monuments as remain, and to make due provision for their protection and preservation. AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL SURVEY. The first thing to be done in the interest of our ancient monuments, it seems to me, is to have an Archaeological survey of the United Kingdom made by and at the expense of Government, similar to the Topographical and Geological surveys which have already been executed. That such a survey is practicable is proved by experience. That it would be of the very greatest service to science can hardly be questioned. The Rev. Alfred C. Smith has published a valuable archaeological map of the Downs of North Wiltshire on the scale of six inches to the mile, with a relative memoir.2 Mr. George Payne has given us a similar map of Kent, but on a much smaller scale,8 and Sir John Evans another of Hertfordshire.4 1David Ure, textit History of Rutherglen and East Kilbride (Glasgow, 1793), p. 210, notes the destruction that was going on a hundred years ago. John Williams, twenty years earlier, menti...
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