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EDWARD LHWYD: ANTIQUARY AND ARCHAEOLOGIST RICHARD ELLIS, in a paper read before the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion in 1907 and entitled 'Some incidents in the Life of Edward Lluyd', described Lhwyd as 'a scholar of brilliant and many-sided genius who attained a high place amongst the learned of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries'. Ellis goes on to say that 'the fields of his research were numerous; in each of them he won distinction, in each he gleaned results of lasting value. He is eminent in botany, in geology and in many branches of archaeology. In philology, his position as one of the founders of the study is one of high distinction'. Sir John Rhys endorsed the verdict of Lhwyd as a philologist. Ten years before Ellis's lecture in London, he was lecturing in Oswestry and described Lhwyd as 'a great man, a very great man he was, in many respects the greatest Celtic philologist the world has ever seen'. Sir Hans Sloane called Lhwyd 'the best naturalist in Europe'. What was he really like as an archaeologist, working as he did at a time when the discipline of archaeology was slowly and with pain and difficulty emerging from mediaeval antiquar- ianism? The early mediaeval antiquary, like Geoffrey of Monmouth, invented the past, although he may have had a vetustissimus liber, and it is difficult to believe that his statements that Stonehenge came from the west and the builders of megalithic monuments in the British Isles came from Spain are not the result of a long folk memory.3 The later mediaeval and early modern antiquary did not wish to invent. He wished to look at sources and the only sources that seemed available to him were written sources: these were of two kinds, the Bible and classical writers. So it was that men of good faith and high hope in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, eschewing invention and unable to distinguish between legend and myth-Geoffrey on megaliths is legend-turned to the only written sources that seemed to say anything about the past of Britain and came back with answers that dealt mainly with the Flood and the Druids.4 1 Gunther, 1945, p. 1. Ibid.. 1945, p. 51, quoting Bye-Gones. XIII, 363. a Kendrick, 1950; Piggott, 1941; Thorpe. 1966. 4 Daniel, 1962.