life upon the surface of the earth, has
attractions which bind the votaries of it to its ardent study, surely
Archaeology has equal, if not stronger claims to urge in its own behoof
and favour. To the human mind the study of those relics by which the
archaeologist tries to recover and reconstruct the history of the past
races and nations of man, should naturally form as engrossing a topic as
the study of those relics by which the geologist tries to regain the
history of the past races and families of the _fauna_ and _flora_ of the
ancient world. Surely, as a mere matter of scientific pursuit, the
ancient or fossil states of man should--for man himself--have
attractions as great, at least, as the ancient or fossil states of
plants and animals; and the old Celt, or Pict, or Saxon, be as
interesting a study as the old Lepidodendron or Ichthyosaurus.

Formerly, the pursuit of Archaeology was not unfrequently regarded as a
kind of romantic dilettanteism, as a collecting together of meaningless
antique relics and oddities, as a greedy hoarding and storing up of
rubbish and frivolities that were fit only for an old curiosity shop,
and that were valued merely because they were old;--while the essays and
writings of the antiquary were looked down upon as disquisitions upon
very profitless conjectures, and very solemn trivialities. Perhaps the
objects and method in which antiquarian studies were formerly pursued
afforded only too much ground for such accusations. But all this is now,
in a great measure, entirely changed. Archaeology, as tempered and
directed by the philosophic spirit, and quickened with the life and
energy of the nineteenth century, is a very different pursuit from the
Archaeology of our forefathers, and has as little relation to their
antiquarianism as modern Chemistry and modern Astronomy have to their
former prototypes--Alchemy and Astrology. In proof of this, I may
confidently appeal to the good work which Archaeology has done, and the
great advances which it has struck out in different directions within
the last fifty years. Within this brief period it has made discoveries,
perhaps in themselves of as momentous and marvellous a character as
those of which any other modern science can boast. Let me cite two or
three instances in illustration of this remark.

Dating, then, from the commencement of the present century, Archaeology
has--amidst its other work--rediscovered, through the interpretation of
the Ros