Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. José Leite de Vasconcelos Cardoso Pereira de Melo (1858 1941) was a Portuguese ethnographer and prolific author who wrote extensively on Portuguese philology and prehistory. He was the founder and the first director of the Portuguese National Museum of Archaeology. Since childhood, Leite de Vasconcelos was attentive to his surroundings, recording in small notebooks everything that interested him. At 18 he went to Oporto, where in 1881 he completed a degree in natural sciences and, in 1886, a second degree in medicine. However, he practiced as a physician for only one year, serving as a health care administrator in Cadaval during 1887.