Note 2576 — THE CONFIGURATION OF THE COAST OF KENT IN THE TIME OF CAESAR

It would be a waste of time to catalogue these blunders, which will be obvious to any one who knows the literature of the subject: but I may remark that Dowker devotes several pages to a refutation of Elliott’s earlier theory, which Elliott himself corrected in the notes with which he furnished Lewin; and that he ignored or was ignorant of Elliott’s matured conclusions. He says (p. 214) that Elliott’s ‘first paper was written to assist Mr. Lewin ... and his theory was printed with Mr. Roach Smith’s “History of Further Excavations and History of the Roman Castrum at Lympne”’. Elliott’s first paper (Proc. Inst. Civil Engineers, vi, 1847) was not written to assist Lewin; nor was his second, which was printed, not in a book which neither Roach Smith nor any one else ever published, but as an appendix to Roach Smith’s Report on Excavations made on the site of the Roman Castrum at Lymne, 1852. The notes which Elliott wrote to assist Lewin were printed in the second edition of Lewin’s Invasion of Britain by Julius Caesar, which appeared in 1862, and which Dowker never mentions. The unhappy man cannot even refer correctly to his own works. In his bibliographical note (p. 223) he quotes under his own name a paper ‘On the River Limen’, in Archaeol. Cant., vol. xviii, in which no such paper is to be found.