t, till the times when they
learned to plait and weave dresses of hair, wool, and other fibres, and
adorned their chiefs with torcs and armlets of bronze, silver, and gold.
Archaeology also has sought out and studied the strongholds and forts,
the land and lake habitations of these, our primaeval Celtic and Teutonic
forefathers:--and has discovered among their ruins many interesting
specimens of the implements they used, the dresses that they wore, the
houses they inhabited, and the very food they fed upon. It has descended
also into their sepulchres and tombs, and there--among the mysterious
contents of their graves and cinerary urns--it has found revealed many
other wondrous proofs of their habits and condition during this life, as
well as of their creeds and faith in regard to a future state of
existence.

By the aid of that new and most powerful ally, Comparative Philology,
Archaeology has lately made other great advances. By proofs exactly of
the same linguistic kind as those by which the modern Spanish, French,
and other Latin dialects can be shown to have all radiated from Rome as
their centre, the old traditions of the eastern origin of all the chief
nations of Europe have been proved to be fundamentally true; for by
evidence so "irrefragable" (to use the expression of the Taylorian
professor of modern languages at Oxford), that "not an English jury
could now-a-days reject it," Philological Archaeology has shown that of
the three great families of mankind--the Semitic, the Turanian, and the
Aryan--this last, the Aryan, Japhetic, or Indo-European race, had its
chief home about the centre of Western Asia;--that betimes there issued
thence from its paternal hearths, and wended their way southward, human
swarms that formed the nations of Persia and Hindustan;--that at distant
and different, and in some cases earlier periods, there hived off from
the same parental stock other waves of population, which wandered
westward, and formed successively the European nations of the Celts, the
Teutons, the Italians, the Greeks, and the Sclaves;--and that while each
exodus of this western emigration, which followed in the wake of its
fellow, drove its earliest predecessor before it in a general direction
further and further towards the setting sun, at the same time some
aboriginal, and probably Turanian races, which previously inhabited
portions of Europe, were gradually pushed and pressed aside and upwards,
by the more powerful