alaeolithic 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 from these his proper and
elevated functions into trivial and puerile disquisitions upon the
antiquity of man (when he ought rather to be admiring the juvenility of
woman), or the precise date of the Anglo-Saxon conquest (when he should
by rights be concentrating the whole force of his massive intellect upon
the arduous task of arranging for dinner), proves himself at once
unworthy of his high position, and should forthwith be deposed from the
secretariat by public acclamation.

Having once entrapped your perfect secretary, you set him busily to work
beforehand to make all the arrangements for your expected excursion, the
archaeologists generally cordially recognising the important principle
that he pays all the expenses he incurs out of his own pocket, and
drives splendid bargains on their account with hotel-keepers, coachmen,
railway companies, and others to feed, lodge, supply, and convey them at
fabulously low prices throughout the whole expedition. You also
understand that the secretary will call upon everybody in the
neighbourhood you propose to visit, induce the rectors to throw open
their churches, square the housekeepers of absentee dukes, and beard the
owners of Elizabethan mansions in their own dens. These little
preliminaries being amicably settled, you get together your
archaeologists and set out upon your intended tour.

An archaeologist, it should be further premised, has no necessary
personal connection with archaeology in any way. He (or she) is a human
being, of assorted origin, age, and sex, known as an archaeologist then
and there on no other ground than the possession of a ticket (price
half-a-guinea) for that particular archaeological meeting. Who would not
be a man (or woman) of science on such easy and unexacting terms? Most
archaeologists within my own private experience, indeed, are ladies of
various ages, many of them elderly, but ma