Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 9.djvu/18

6 illustration from literature and engraving. The Mechanical, or purely useful Arts, on the other hand, seem to have obtained less favour with antiquarian students. Yet to this age and country few exhibitions could be more appropriate than a collection of the various productions of useful manufacture, and (if possible) of any machinery employed in their fabrication, each deduced from their infancy, and arranged chronologically, so as to elucidate not merely the progress of mechanical science, but the growing wants of civilization.

Even to the Fine Arts Archaeology can scarcely be said to have fully discharged its duty, whilst the preservation of so many of their noblest monuments is at least not enforced as a public obligation. Such a charge was specially imposed on the Comité des Arts et des Monuments, established in France by M. Guizot: and in a great and civilized community, proud of its history, and jealous of its rights, some provision for protecting the trophies of ancestral genius from the injuries of time and change seems no unreasonable demand for Archaeology to make on the State.

One further claim which Art has long urged upon us, but which still remains unfulfilled, can here be barely glanced at; the institution of a Museum for reduced models of the noblest edifices of antiquity, with plaster casts of their finer and minuter details, and also for a collection of casts from the best productions of ancient sculpture, a collection which would concentrate ampler materials for artistic study than any single gallery of original works, either here or on the continent.

To fulfil all the functions that have here been suggested, is more than can be expected of any man or body of men. But it is the prerogative, and the duty, of a Society with such an organization as the Archaeological Institute, to collect from the remotest sources the demands of science, and holding, as it were, from time to time, its commissions of Oyer and Terminer, to judge at least such claims as it is unable to discharge, and note such deficiencies as it cannot supply. Let it endeavour to centralize the operations of scattered fellow-workers: in some it may aid by its machinery, in others influence by its authority; in all it may encourage, advise, report; but it must never be overlooked, that it is by the energy of individuals that all real success is gained.