Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/30

2 plants pass over the field of vision, each connected with that which preceded it, and each becoming more and more highly organised, until man appears the last born as well as the highest and the noblest creature in the realm of geology.

The archæologists in the meanwhile have raised the study of antiquities to the rank of a science by the use of a purely inductive method, and have accumulated materials which enable us to establish a tolerably complete sequence of events from the remote past in which man stands in the geological foreground down to the borders of history. To them we owe the knowledge of the steps by which man slowly freed himself from the bondage of the natural conditions under which all other creatures live; of the successive discoveries of the use of polished stone, bronze, and iron; of the domestication of animals; of the cultivation of the fruits of the earth; of the introduction of the arts; in a word, of all those things by which man has become what the historian finds him.

The writers of history—Freeman, Green, Stubbs, Guest, and others—have carefully sifted the true from the false, the certain from the uncertain, in the records of this country, and have consolidated, so to speak, their domain, so that it can be used by the archæologist as a base for the conquest of what lies beyond. If, however, in this respect, archæology be indebted to historical criticism, she is now in a position to repay the debt with ample interest. In the pages of the historian, man appears in the high state of civilisation marked by the use of letters, and the written record is silent as to his progress up to that point. The steps by which that civilisation was achieved are pointed out by prehistoric archæology, and these are traced back until man is