Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 9.djvu/14

2 multiplicity, as well as the individual interest, of details. In the sciences which are conversant with necessary matter, and employ demonstrative reasoning, success or failure, progress or decline, are immediately recognised; for the sum of problems solved, or laws discovered, determines the amount of gain. But in those which deal only with what is contingent, the estimate is more difficult; for we have first to pronounce upon the proof of facts admitting no higher evidence than probability, and then to determine the value of the truths established by reference to the general condition of the science.

In the instance of Archaeology, it will hardly be possible to arrive at a correct judgment of its state and progress, without some attempt to distinguish and classify the materials with which it has to deal, and the methods of treatment properly applicable to each. A principle of classification, available in limine, is suggested by the motive from which the study is pursued. This may be, firstly, the discovery of evidence, primary or collateral, in proof of what is emphatically termed "History," that is, the record of ancient events directly affecting the public relations and interests of nations, regarded as communities. Archaeology, in this point of view, acts simply as the purveyor to another, though kindred, science; and its present efficiency must be tested by the value of the evidence applicable for this purpose which it is daily contributing. Such value will depend, like that of all other evidence, upon the proportionate importance of the events thereby proved, upon the conclusiveness of the proof, and especially upon the absence of other testimony; from which last consideration it incidentally results, that the most profitable field for researches founded on this motive will be the darkest.

A second motive may be the illustration of personal life amongst our ancestors, in points of which national History takes no account, as lying, in a manner, off its highway. Archaeology here no longer holds a merely ancillary position, but itself rises to the level of History, as it furnishes the only memorial of what the great masses of mankind individually were, and did, and thought, and felt, in former ages; questions more essential to the true biography of the human race, than the locality of a battle-field, the legitimacy of a dynasty, or the constitution of a senate: for,