Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/109

Rh morphology of this series of coins were published ten years before the appearance of Darwin's great work on the Origin of Species. When we come to the consideration of the relics of the early iron and bronze ages the aid of chemistry has of necessity to be invoked. By its means we are able to determine whether the iron of a tool or weapon is of meteoritic or volcanic origin, or has been reduced from iron ore, in which case considerable knowledge of metallurgy would be involved on the part of those who made it. With bronze antiquities the nature and extent of the alloys combined with the copper may throw light not only on their chronological position but on the sources whence the copper, tin, and other metals of which they consist were originally derived. I am not aware of there being sufficient differences in the analyses of the native copper from different localities in the region in which we are assembled for Canadian archæologists to fix the sources from which the metal was obtained which was used in the manufacture of the ancient tools and weapons of copper that are occasionally discovered in this part of the globe. Like chemistry, mineralogy and petrology may be called to the assistance of archæology in determining the nature and source of the rocks of which ancient stone implements are made; and, thanks to researches of the followers of those sciences, the old view that all such implements formed of jade and found in Europe must of necessity have been fashioned from material imported from Asia can no longer be maintained. In one respect the archæologist differs in opinion from the mineralogist—namely, as to the propriety of chipping off fragments from perfect and highly finished specimens for the purpose of submitting them to microscopic examination.

I have hitherto been speaking of the aid that other sciences can afford to archæology when dealing with questions that come almost, if not quite, within the fringe of history, and belong to times when the surface of our earth presented much the same configuration as regards the distribution of land and water and hill and valley as it does at present, and when in all probability the climate was much the same as it now is. When, however, we come to discuss that remote age in which we find the earliest traces that are at present known of man's appearance upon earth the age of geology and paleontology becomes absolutely imperative. The changes in the surface configuration and in the extent of the land, especially in a country like Britain, as well as the modifications of the fauna and flora since those days, have been such that the archæologist pure and simple is incompetent to deal with them, and he must either himself undertake the study of these other sciences or call experts in them to his assistance. The evidence that man had already appeared upon the earth is afforded by stone implements wrought by