The Council, being of opinion that the Fellows should have a full knowledge of the conditions under which the Society is carrying on its work at the present time, has authorized the following statement.

The first concern has been for the safety of the Society's possessions.

Thirteen thousand five hundred books, weighing about thirty-four tons, have been removed from Burlington House to twenty-five country repositories in Wales, south-west England, the northwest Midlands, the Chilterns, and elsewhere. The remaining books at Burlington House have been stacked and protected as far as is possible against fire. Those selected for evacuation were valuable manuscripts and rare books, topographical works, periodicals (English and foreign), with special reference to their usefulness and the difficulty of replacing them. The Library Index of about 500,000 cards, the Indexes of Lantern Slides and of Prints and Drawings, as well as a selection of the Society's stock of early publications, have also been removed.

It is by no means improbable that many standard works of reference owe their being to sheer exasperation of spirit. It is not, certainly, ascertained that there has ever been compiled any Dictionary of Bricklaying and Masonry, for example, by a working Cabinet Minister. But such an association of subject and author would not be more far-fetched than that of a quite well-known civil engineer in his day, Sir George Grove, and his even better-known Dictionary of Music; or of the medical man Peter Mark Roget and his verbal Thesaurus. The amateur, it may be supposed, hampered in the prosecution of one of his secondary interests by the lack of any comprehensively encyclopaedic work on it, must snatch time from his main calling in order to provide such an adjunct, though he might have counted on finding it ready done for him by experts. Papworth and his Ordinary of Arms offer a reasonably close parallel to those other cases. The practising architect would trench upon his scanty leisure to labour at an index of coat-armour—felt as indispensable as it was lacking to a fuller pursuit of his heraldic studies—because an adequate one done by specialists was not to hand.

The remarkable miniature of the Virgin and Child reproduced here (pl. 1) is found in a copy of St. Augustine's Commentary on Psalms ci-cl now in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. It is drawn on the blank recto of the first folio of the text. The verso of the leaf has the opening words of the work set out in capitals with an elaborately decorated initial letter. The Virgin is seated on a throne whose arms end in dogs' heads, and the whole composition is framed by a mandorla. She holds the Infant Christ on her left knee and supports Him with her left hand. In her right hand is a long sceptre ending in a trefoil upon which a bird perches. The bottom of the sceptre has a curious indent where her fingers grasp it. This may be an allusion to the ‘radix Jesse’, since it slightly resembles a root.

The work of the French mission under Ghirshman, at Tepe Sialk near Kashan, on the Iranian plateau, has now given us a picture of the use of copper from the earliest times up to 3000 B.C., when the copper industry became firmly established. The present paper is an attempt to trace the development of the metallurgy of prehistoric copper in the light of the new evidence which is now available.

The Glendarragh sub-megalithic circle and its adjoining alignments are situated in the parish of Marown at a height of 450 ft. on the northern slope of The Mount, a north-east outlier of the southern Manx hill-mass(O.S. 1 in. Sheet 19, Sq.K.6). Drainage from the surrounding fields collects at the site into a small southern tributary of the river Dhoo, which flows eastward to Douglas. The valley of the larger stream forms the south-eastern half of the middle gap of the Isle of Man, an important routeway in prehistoric and Early Christian times. The site commands the wide slopes above the marshy alluvial tracts of this south-eastern portion of the middle gap, and on the sky-line are the magnificent broken uplands which form the heart of the northern hill-mass. The view is known locally as ‘The Plains of Heaven’. The name ‘Glendarragh’ is said to signify in the Manx ‘The Valley of the Oaks’.