REPORT OF PROGRESS OF THE "BRAND
COMMITTEE" FOR THE YEAR 1917.
The outstanding event of the year has been the lamented death of Dr. H. B. Wheatley, D.C.L., F.S.A., the Editor-in-Chief under whose guidance the work of revision has been conducted from the first. His sound judgment, his training in historical research, his wide acquaintance with bibliography, and his lifelong experience of literary work, made him invaluable as a leader, and it is with a heavy sense of loss that your Committee present this Report.
The form which the revision of the Popular Antiquities should take has undergone various modifications since the commencement of the undertaking; but some three months before his death Dr. Wheatley drew up the following scheme, which has been formally adopted by the Committee and shows the lines on which they propose to work :
"1. The groundwork to be the material gathered by the Brand Committee, and the arrangement of this material to be the main object.
2. Sir Henry Ellis's work (considered as the most complete edition) to be broken up entirely: rejected or retained at discretion. Passages which are retained to be arranged in their proper position in connection with the new material. Additions in subsequently published editions of Ellis and in special copies with MS. annotations to be dealt with in the same manner.
3. Assign all passages retained to the editions in which they respectively appeared for the first time,
