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 comparison of the present with the past. The footsteps of civilization, from their earliest faint trace upon the rugged and yet impressionable soil of the savage state to their perfected development in the polished empire, are to be ascertained, not from the confused medley of blended history, but, as individuals constitute the mass, from the archæological analysis of personal domestic life. It is the habit of the house which attunes the temper of the nation, and the portraiture of its common daily existence gives us the truest index to the political changes of a people. If archæology therefore be frittered away upon trivialities, it is to the oblivion of its high import as the enunciator of historical record; but its value can no more be impugned by its abuse, than sound scholarship be invalidated because of the prevalence of pedantry. Commercial wealth, its progress through refinement, luxury, and effeminacy, to the final extinction of national greatness; the improvement in arts and arms, the defence of the homestead against the fortress; the recognition of plebeian liberty, the circumscription of feudal oppression, are cognizable from individual acumen exercised upon the sculptured urn and record of the dead; so that the true patriot becomes of necessity the antiquarian, and if history be looked to as the summary of ancient facts, she must rely for evidence upon the corroboration of archæology.

No slight efficacy, however, is given to these pursuits by the circumstance of antiquarian societies resulting from individual taste, and not from legal enforcement. Whatever good (it is very little) human nature is inclined to do spontaneously, it will probably do best. Antiquarian research has been ever but slenderly patronized by Government, but gratifies its promoters by emanating