always in the last resort obtained from the material held in solution in some ancient or modern sea.  Even the saline springs of Canada and the Northern States of America, where the wapiti love to congregate, and the noble hunter lurks in the thicket to murder them unperceived, derive their saltness, as an able Canadian geologist has shown, from the thinly scattered salts still retained among the sediments of that very archaic sea whose precipitates form the earliest known life-bearing rocks.  To the Homeric Greek, as to Mr. Dick Swiveller, the ocean was always the briny:  to modern science, on the other hand (which neither of those worthies would probably have appreciated at its own valuation), the briny is always the oceanic.  The fossil food which we find to-day on all our dinner-tables dates back its origin primarily to the first seas that ever covered the surface of our planet, and secondarily to the great rock deposits of the dried-up triassic inland sea.  And yet even our men of science habitually describe that ancient mineral as common salt.

OGBURY BARROWS

We went to Ogbury Barrows on an archaeological expedition.  And as the very name of archaeology, owing to a serious misconception incidental to human nature, is enough to deter most people from taking any further interest in our proceedings when once we got there, I may as well begin by explaining, for the benefit of those who have never been to one, the method and manner of an archaeological outing.

The first thing you have to do is to catch your secretary.  The genuine secretary is born, not made; and therefore you have got to catch him, not to appoint him.  Appointing a secretary is pure vanity and vexation of spirit; you must find the right man made ready to your hand; and when you have found him you will soon see that he slips into the onerous duties of the secretariat as if to the manner born, by pure instinct.  The perfect secretary is an urbane old gentleman of mature years and portly bearing, a dignified representative of British archaeology, with plenty of money and plenty of leisure, possessing a heaven-born genius for organisation, and utterly unhampered by any foolish views of his own about archaeological research or any other kindred subject.  The secretary who archaeologises is lost.  His business is not to discourse of early English windows or of palaeolithic hatchets, of buried villas or of Plantagenet pedigrees, of Roman tile-work or of dolichocephalic skulls, but to provide abundant brakes, drags, and carriages, to take care that the owners of castles and baronial residences throw them open (with lunch provided) to the ardent student of British antiquities, to see that all the old ladies have somebody to talk to, and all the young ones somebody to flirt with, and generally to superintend the morals, happiness, and personal comfort of some fifty assorted scientific enthusiasts.  The secretary who diverges