Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 8.djvu/17

Rh These obsolete and rare forms of speech are to the philologist what the extinct Faunas and Floras of the primeval world are to the comparative anatomist and the botanist, and, as Geology collects and prepares for the physiologist these scattered elements of the history of nature, so does Archaeology glean these vestiges of language, and construct out of them glossaries of provincial words, that they may form evidence in the great scheme of modern Philology.

As only a certain portion of the spoken language of a race is permanently incorporated in its literature, so its written poetry and history only represent a certain portion of the national tradition. Every peasantry has its songs and mythic legends, its rude oral narrative of real events, blended with its superstitions. Archaeology rescues these from oblivion, by making them a part of Printed Literature. It is thus that Walter Scott has collected the minstrelsy of the Scottish border, and Grimm the traditions of Germany.

Such relics are of peculiar interest to the historian of literature, because they contain the germ of Written History and Poetry; before the epic comes the ballad, the first chronicle is the sum of many legends.

But unwritten tradition is not all embodied in language, it has been partly preserved to us in manners and customs. In a rude, unlettered age, indeed at all times when men are too ignorant, hurried, or pre-occupied to be acted upon by language alone, the instinct of those who govern the multitude has suggested other means.

Symbolic acts and gestures, tokens, forms, ceremonies, customs are all either supplementary to or the substitute for articulate speech.

In the processions, military triumphs, coronations, nuptials, and funeral ceremonies of all races we see this unwritten, inarticulate, symbolic, language in its most fully developed and eloquent form.

Hence it is obviously necessary for the Archaeologist to study customs. Addressing the eye by symbols more generally and readily understood even than words, they may be said to exhibit the utterance of thought in its most primitive and elementary form; the repetition of such utterance becomes record which, however rude and precarious, may still rank as a distinct source of historical evidence.

For the observance of such customs as fall under the