Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 8.djvu/40

26 of the learning of the Philologer; the plodding drudgery which gathers together his materials, must not blunt the critical acuteness required for their classification and interpretation, nor should that habitual suspicion which must ever attend the scrutiny and precede the warranty of archaeological evidence, give too sceptical a bias to his mind.

The Archaeologist cannot, like the Scholar, carry on his researches in his own library, almost independent of outward circumstances.

For his work of reference and collation he must travel, excavate, collect, arrange, delineate, decipher, transcribe, before he can place his whole subject before his mind.

He cannot do all this single-handed; in order to have free scope for his operations he must perfect the machinery of museums and societies.

A museum of antiquities is to the Archaeologist what a botanical garden is to the Botanist; it presents his subject compendiously, synoptically suggestively, not in the desultory and accidental order in which he would otherwise be brought in contact with its details.

An Archaeological Society gives corporate strength to efforts singly of little account; it can discover, preserve, register, and publish on a far greater scale, and with more system, than any individual, however zealous and energetic.

A society which would truly administer the ample province of British Archaeology should be at once the Historian of national art and manners, the Keeper of national record and antiquities, the Ædile of national monuments.

These are great functions. Let us try, in part at least, to fulfil them. But let us not forget that national Archaeology, however earnestly and successfully pursued, can only disclose to us one stage in the whole scheme of human development—one chapter in the whole Book of human History—can supply but a few links in that chain of continuous tradition, which connects the civilised nineteenth century with the races of the primeval world,—which holds together this great brotherhood in bonds of attachment more enduring than the ties of national consanguinity, more ennobling even than the recollections of ancestral glory,—which, traversing the ruins of empires, unmoved by the shock of revolutions, spans the abyss of time, and transmits onward the message of the Past.