lated by the fond
hope that through such means she will yet gradually recover more and
more of the earlier chronicles and lost annals of the human race, and of
the various individual communities and families of that race.

The objects of antiquarian research embrace events and periods, many of
which are placed within the era of written evidence; but many more are
of a date long anterior to the epoch when man made that greatest of
human discoveries--the discovery, namely, of the power of permanently
recording words, thoughts, and acts, in symbolical and alphabetic
writing. To some minds it has seemed almost chimerical for the
archaeologist to expect to regain to any extent a knowledge of the
conditions and circumstances of man, and of the different nations of
men, before human cunning had learned to collect and inscribe them on
stone or brass, or had fashioned them into written or traditional
records capable of being safely floated down the stream of time. But the
modern history of Archaeology, as well as the analogies of other allied
pursuits, are totally against any such hopeless views.

Almost within the lifetime of some who are still amongst us, there has
sprung up and been cultivated--and cultivated most successfully too--a
science which has no written documents or legible inscriptions to guide
it on its path, and whose researches are far more ancient in their
object than the researches of Archaeology. Its subject is an antiquity
greatly older than human antiquity. It deals with the state of the earth
and of the inhabitants of the earth in times immeasurably beyond the
earliest times studied by the antiquary. In the course of its
investigations it has recovered many strange stories and marvellous
chronicles of the world and of its living occupants--long, long ages
before human antiquity even began. But if Geology has thus successfully
restored to us long and important chapters in the pre-Adamite annals of
the world's history, need Archaeology despair of yet deciphering and
reading--infinitely more clearly than it has yet done--that far later
episode in the drama of the past which opens with the appearance of man
as a denizen of earth. The modes of investigating these two allied and
almost continuous sciences--Geology and Archaeology--are the same in
principle, however much the two sciences themselves may differ in
detail. And if Geology, in its efforts to regain the records of the past
state of animal and vegetable