"The meeting of the London Anthropological Society held last night was devoted to the account by Captain Burton of his recent extraordinary discoveries in Istria, and was certainly the most interesting and crowded meeting which has taken place since the palmy days of Dr. Hunt and the great Negro question. "Captain Burton, as most of our readers know, was sent last year by the late Liberal Government to a Consulate at Trieste, and there were many who thought that the lack of interest which the public generally feels in this extremely dull town would induce the gallant Captain to lead a quieter scientific life than he had hitherto followed at Brazil or Damascus. But he has devoted the first holiday he had to the excavation of a new series of prehistoric antiquities. The very existence of the Istrian _castellieri_ was a secret to England. The well-known authority on rude stone monuments, James Fergusson, wrote to Captain Burton that nothing was known of the _castellieri_, and that a description was interesting and important, as showing they are or are not connected with the prehistoric monuments of Sardinia, or the Giants' Towers of Malta, or the Balearic Isles. The Mediterranean Islands contain many stray antiquities of whose origin we know nothing, and we must wait till congeners are found for us on the continent of Europe. As all schoolboys know, at the northern extremity of the Adriatic Gulf there lies a little triangle of land. This is Istria. Its position must have rendered it in early times a fit habitation, for uncivilized man would naturally prefer it to the cold and sterile Austrian provinces north-east and east of it. The neighbourhood of the sea supplies it with abundant winter rains. The peninsula was doubtless inhabited in early ages, and local students still trace in the modern Veneto-Italian speech remnants of the old Illyrian Istri, or Histri, whose dialect has been vaguely connected with Etruscan, Nubian, Illyrian, Keltic, Greek, and Phœnician. Various barbarous tribes occupied it, and successive revolutions and incursions of many ancient populations have left their traces on the manners, customs, and language of the people. Overrun by the barbarians, subject to a succession of conquerors, annexed by Venice, colonized by Slavs, Istria has been copiously written about. Captain Burton gave an enormous series of references to the past history of the bibliography of Istria, which reflected the greatest possible glory on the natives of a small province of Austria, who have worked up their own country's history to an extent which English antiquaries can scarcely rival. But the pith of Captain Burton's paper was, of course, the minute description of the _castellieri_ themselves. These were hill forts of which a perfect military disposition was effected, so that on all occasions two points were always in sight for convenience of signalling. The experienced