Mice inoculated with microfilariae of the filarial nematode Onchocerca lienalis clear their parasites over a period of 3–4 months and are highly resistant to re-infection. We have investigated the comparative roles of the eosinophil, macrophage and neutrophil in effecting this parasite clearance, employing agents specifically to perturb cell function in vivo. Using the anti-IL-5 monoclonal antibody TRFK-5, we show that eosinophils are of primary importance in effecting resistance to re-infection. Ablation of macrophages (with carbon) and neutrophils (with the monoclonal antibody NIMP-R14) had no effect on parasite clearance following re-infection. Neutralization of these 3 cell types during a primary infection showed that while the removal of both eosinophils and macrophages caused a small but significant delay in parasite clearance, the depletion of neutrophils had no effect. This report describes the first direct evidence for eosinophil-mediated killing of microfilariae in vivo, and is consistent with Th-2 cell responses previously described in this model.

While anaemia has long been recognized as a consequence of acute infections with malaria, the relative contributions of direct erythrocyte destruction by parasites, destruction of uninfected erythrocytes and changes in erythropoiesis have been unclear. Fitting of parasitaemia and anaemia data from neurosyphilis patients undergoing malaria therapy to a mathematical model shows that in these patients, an average of 8·5 erythrocytes were destroyed in addition to each erythrocyte observed to become parasitized. The model also showed that dyserythropoiesis plays an insignificant role in the resulting anaemia. The anaemia occurs before a substantial antibody response to parasites or erythrocytes could be generated. We postulate that uninfected erythrocyte destruction occurs through phagocytosis of erythrocytes bound to merozoites killed as a result of the accompanying malaria paroxysms.

Over 95% of laying fowls in the UK are now housed in conventional battery cages. In recent years the general public and more specifically an Agricultural Committee on Animal Welfare in Poultry (1981) have raised doubts concerning the welfare of hens maintained this way and have called for further studies on alternative systems.

Consequently investigations into three alternatives to battery cages have been initiated: a range and covered strawyard system at The West of Scotland Agricultural College and a modified deep litter system at The East of Scotland College of Agriculture. The main objective of these investigations is to determine the practical feasibility and welfare consequences of the respective systems as alternatives to cages for keeping laying fowls. As well as recording productivity, the behavioural activities and distribution of wing-tagged birds have been monitored within the flocks of both the strawyard and deep litter systems. In all three studies ISA Brown layers were used and compared with sister stock housed in cages.

1. I Published a large number of clay sealings found in 1901 in a house of Late Minoan I. period at Zakro, Crete, in the Journal of Hellenic Studies (xxii. p. 76), with photographs of casts made in Candia from the different types. A representative set of duplicate sealings was afterwards presented to me by the Cretan Government and placed in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. When I became Keeper of this Museum some years later, I had these sealings recleaned and re-cast, and so obtained a clearer view of one type (No. 10 on p. 78 of the original publication). As it has some features of interest of which I was unaware previously, I republish it here.

I had described it, from collation of thirty imperfectly cleaned impressions of the type, as ‘A female in long bell-skirt with hands on breast, opposed to a figure with cap and long mantle (?) from neck to feet.’ This description was wrong in several particulars. The female figure on the impression is moving to the left, and has one hand on her right breast, the other on her three-fold girdle. It is impossible to determine whether her face is turned full to the front or is seen in profile one way or the other. She is followed, not opposed, by another figure in peaked cap, cloak hanging loosely from the neck to the hips, and long round skirt. This figure, (perhaps male) bears over its left shoulder a long-handled axe.

So little is known concerning the site of the famous Hierapolis of Syria, that even a hurried visit is worthy of record. I passed through the place twice in the spring of 1908, in the company of Mr. Richard Norton, stopping on each occasion a night and part of two days. It was inadvisable, in view of the main purpose of my journey, to delay long enough to make a plan, or do anything else likely to excite the ready suspicion of the local authorities and the Circassian colonists. We contented ourselves, therefore, with making a general survey and photographing, with copying all inscriptions which the promise of a reward could induce the Circassians to show us, and with buying small antiquities.

May I be allowed to correct and hereby to do penance for a blunder which defaces three or four passages in the recent British Museum publication on Ephesus ? A mental confusion between Lygdamis, the leader of the Cimmerians or Treres, who probably burned one of the earlier Artemisia, and Pythagoras, a pre-Persian tyrant, who is said to have had to build a temple at Ephesus in expiation for desecrating ‘the Hieron,’ took possession of me during the lapse of a year between writing Chapters I. and XIV., and led me to make the absurd suggestion on p. 245 that Temple B was completed ‘perhaps at the cost of Lygdamis by the middle of the seventh century,’ and to call the latter a ‘tyrant’ and a ‘traitor.’ The last epithet is particularly uncalled for, since the little we know of Lygdamis shows him as a bold tribal leader who died at the head of his horde. If he burned Temple A, neither he nor Pythagoras was the builder of Temple B; and if the latter built any Artemision it can only have been either Temple A (after desecrating a pre-existent hieron) or Temple C. But, as I have stated on p. 7, it is so doubtful whether there is any reference to the Artemision at all in the solitary extant passage regarding Pythagoras, that the suggestion of his responsibility for any of the primitive shrines on the site is hardly worth making. This mental confusion passed away from me in Syria while reflecting on the westward expeditions of Assurbanipal, in attacking whose Cilician vassal Lygdamis came by his death; but it was then too late to make amends even in a list of errata, as I had left the book passed for press on quitting England.

In the spring of 1903 I was enabled by a grant from the Craven Fund of the University of Oxford to return to the site of Naukratis. Having left certain parts of the Mounds unexplored in 1899 because they were either too high, or too sodden with the infiltration of water, I intended to attack them whenever the sebakh diggers should have removed the unproductive upper layers, and a season of low Nile level had occurred. The results of this campaign, the last, I expect, that will be undertaken at Naukratis, I embody in the following Report, discussing at the same time certain points on which new light can be thrown from other sources.

Being desirous, after the revelation of intimacy between prehistoric Crete and Egypt which the Cnossian excavations had made, to know if there were indeed no ‘Aegean’ remains in the Lower Delta, I searched the authorities for an account of the extant antiquities of its north central region—north, that is, of the ‘Berari’ railway, which links Dessuk on the Rosetta Nile with Sherbin on the Damietta arm. But in vain. Nor, for that matter, could I find any description of the scenery of the region itself, more detailed and recent than the romantic sketch of the marshes with which Heliodorus opened his Aethiopica. I had myself visited the extreme south-west corner of it in 1896, following in the steps of Messrs. Petrie and Griffith to Tell al-Farain; and the last named scholar had gone on thence a few miles north to the district of Tida. North and east of that point stretched unknown land. So I was forced to undertake an exploration of the region for myself. The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies generously gave a grant in aid; and almost every kind of assistance was furnished on the spot by the Société Anonyme du Behéra, through the great goodwill of its Managing Director Mr. E. W. P. Foster, C.M.G.

The circumstances under which a find of impressed clay nodules was made in a Mycenaean house at Kato Zakro, in East Crete, in May 1901, are related in the Annual of the British School at Athens vii. p. 133. The nodules are of a fine clay baked, probably intentionally and not by the conflagration which destroyed the house, to varying shades of red. A great number are broken, but the more perfect, including many bearing two and three impressions, show a groove on one edge, about an eighth of an inch deep and a little more wide, scored with straight and oblique scratches. This is the impress of something Cylindrical, to which the nodule was pressed while still wet. The appearance of the clay in the grooves shows that this object was not textile, and it may most reasonably be supposed to have been a reed, perhaps a papyrus stalk. The number of nodules is in all about 500.

In describing the recent excavations at Zakro (Annual of the British School at Athens, vii. p. 121 ff.) I stated that the pottery found there could not be fully published yet. Pending the resumption of its study, however, three vases of exceptional excellence, which were copied in Candia by Monsieur E. Gilliéron, may be made known. One of these (No. 1) was found in fragments in the principal house (A) of the Lower Town (ibid. p. 129 ff.), which yielded also the hoard of sealings published in the previous issue of this Journal. The precise findspot was the doorway between the rooms 3 and 5 (v. plan, ibid. p. 131), which. I believe to have contained a stairway of two flights leading to an upper level or storey. These rooms were full of collapsed ruin, among which the fragments of this vase were dispersed. I offered a special reward, and had all sherds dug out of this house minutely examined; but about a third of the vase was not recovered. Part of a second vase (lip and neck) of precisely similar character came from the same rubbish. The other two vases (Nos. 2, 3) figured in the accompanying Plate (XII.) were built up from fragments found in the Λάκκος (Pit I.) on the western spur (ibid. p. 126) among countless sherds of Bronze-Age pottery of the best Cnossian period.

Excavations were undertaken by me on behalf of the Cretan Exploration Fund in the spring of 1901, in pursuance of a programme for exploring the Eteocretan country. Primitive remains had been noted in the Zakro district, by Captain Spratt in 1852, and been more fully described by Prof. F. Halbherr in the Antiquary for 1892 (p. 153). They were visited later by others, notably Prof. L. Mariani in 1893. Mr. A. J. Evans in 1894 and 1896 visited the upper valley, and besides giving a short account of what he saw in the Academy (July 4, 1896), preserved very full notes made on the spot. When a coastal site in East Crete was desired, he recommended these remains, near a natural port, the last on the directest sea-route from the Aegean to the Cyrenaic shore, to my attention.

Such remarkable additions were made by last season's excavations at Knossos and in the Dictaean Cave to the small number of known specimens of pre-Mycenaean painted pottery of Cretan fabric, that it is worth while to deal with this ware anew.

It was first made known by Mr. J. L. Myres, after he had seen and drawn, in the Syllogos Museum at Candia, certain fragments said to have been found in a cave on the southern slope of Ida, two and a half hours above the village of Kamares. In his communication to the Society of Antiquaries (March 14th, 1895, Proc. XV., iii., pp. 351–356, Plates i–iv.) Mr. Myres rightly apprehended the period, character and affinities of this new and singular variety of early Aegean pottery. The colouring of his drawings, however, not having been applied with the models in sight, was not quite correct, and many of the fragments were republished by Dr. L. Mariani, (Monumenti Antichi, Vol. VI., riates 9–11, pp. 334–342), but in some cases were not improved upon. From the reported place of first finding this fabric is commonly called “Kamares“ ware.

No more of it was found for some years. While excavating the lower prehistoric town of Knossos in March last, however, we lighted on many Kamares vases and fragments, and were able to establish the fact that, so far from that ware being a rarity, it is to be looked for in Crete wherever any strata of remains underlie the Mycenaean. It occurred in our digging at Knossos at all points at which the early town was probed to the rock. On the Kephala hill, where the lowest stratum of deposit is a dusty yellow clay full of Neolithic weapons and sherds, Kamares sherds occur, where stratified, immediately above that stratum.

The large double cavern situated to south-west of, and about 500 feet higher than Psychro, avillage of the upland Lasithi plain in Crete, has long been known to contain early votive objects (Plate IX. 1). The discovery was made by peasants about 1883, who were in the habit of housing goats and pigeons there, and in 1886 the noise of it brought to the spot Professor F. Halbherr in company with Dr. J. Hazzidakis. Their mission was to recover as many objects as possible from the peasants' hands, but also in the event they dug over about two square metres of the embanked terrace before the cave in the hope of finding remains of an altar. After their departure the peasants continued to burrow from time to time among the boulders in the upper cave, and to find bronzes, many of which were bought by Mr. A. J. Evans in 1894. In 1895 the latter, with Mr. J. L. Myres, visited the spot, and the same explorer, returning in 1896 and finding in Psychro a piece of an inscribed libation table, made a sinking into the deposit under the north wall of the upper grot, where the table had been found, and unearthed some objects. In 1897 came Mons. J. Demargne, of the French School at Athens, and boring under the south-western wall, found a second piece of a libation table, uninscribed.

The operations of the British School for the first two months of the excavation season of 1900 extended more or less over the whole site of Knosso the summit of the Kephala hillock excepted, which had been bought and reserved by Mr. Evans. In selecting this wide area I had for objective the cemeteries prior to the Geometric Period, the situation of which was, and I regret to say still is, unknown. In the event I found what I had not expected, namely a well-preserved early town.

I subjoin here a Latin inscription of some interest, copied at Knossos. It is rather coarsely cut on a stela unearthed no one knows where some years ago, and first seen by us in the garden adjoining the house of Said Bey Barakakis. The dimensions of the stone are 99 cm. × 38 cm. × 24 cm., and the lettering varies from 5 to 3 cm. in height. The stone is much worn on the right and towards the bottom.

While the discovery of pre-historic remains proceeds apace on Greek soil, there has been for two or three years a certain pause in the exploration of purely Hellenic sites. Olympia, Epidaurus, the Athenian Acropolis, Delos, the Argive Heraeum, and Delphi kept the ball rolling merrily for some twenty years, but compared to those great enterprises in the strictly classical field the present is a day of small things. For some time past the German Institute has undertaken no considerable excavation. The French have only just got to work again at Goulás in Crete. The Greeks have made their most striking discoveries in cemeteries of the early period, to which the British School also has devoted all its energies for two years. Only the Americans have remained faithful to the classical tradition in their heavy and costly excavation of Corinth, which has not been rewarded, however, with much that belongs to any period before the Roman.

Mr. Ernest Gardner, summing up in 1889 the results of the excavations at Naukratis which Mr. Flinders Petrie had begun in 1884, was of opinion that something still remained to be done on the site. This opinion was shared by Mr. Petrie and has been expressed by him more than once, when Greek remains in Egypt were under discussion. A further campaign, therefore, has long been contemplated; and when I heard late in 1898 that very serious encroachments were being made upon the mounds of Gaif, it seemed that it was time to act. Paying a flying visit to the place in December, I found that, compared with Mr. Petrie's map of fourteen years before, the Mounds showed a greatly changed appearance. The “Great Temenos” at the south end had become a cornfield: the “Arab village” shown in the map on the north-east edge of the mound was now divided from the uncultivated land by a broad belt of green, which in the east centre had been pushed far out into the hollow heart of the site by an artificial embankment twelve to fifteen feet high.