But perhaps no intelligent man ever progressed far in archaeological study without discovering for himself this caution:--though the relics of man’s handiwork, unlike his written history, cannot lie, their meaning may in divers ways be misinterpreted. They will not yield it up except to the trained and discerning eye.[9]
Meanwhile toilers in other fields were co-operating with the archaeologists. Physical anthropology began to make strides. Since Davis, Thurnam, and Rolleston described the skeletons which had reposed in the long barrows and the round barrows of Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, Yorkshire, and Northumberland, since Huxley wrote his memoirs on the river-bed skulls of England and Ireland, greater accuracy of method has been evolved, and Beddoe, Turner, Garson, and Haddon have supplemented and corrected their predecessors’ work. Geologists endeavoured to determine the configuration of the land at the time when man first lived in Britain; and a definite result was attained when borings made in implement-bearing beds showed the relative chronology of the period during which palaeolithic hunters had inhabited the eastern counties. Burial customs revealed by the opening of barrows and cists, holes drilled in the stones of dolmens, strange devices sculptured on graves and on rocks, suggested problems as to the religious ideas of the Neolithic and Bronze Ages, which the archaeologist, the ethnographer, and the folklorist attempted to solve. Philologists studied the Celtic languages, and succeeded in some measure in deducing from place-names and other relics of the ancient dialects information bearing upon the history of the invasions and the distribution of the two great branches of the Celtic stock.
A great advance was made when the Comparative Method was brought to bear upon the study of primitive culture. It was recognized that the antiquities of our own island could not be adequately comprehended without reference to those of other lands. For at every turn the inquirer found himself arrested by obstinate questionings. Whence had the immigrants of the Old and the New Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Early Iron Age set out? Whence was the knowledge of bronze derived? What was the starting-point of the culture of the Iron Age? What were the first beginnings of Late Celtic Art? How was one to account for the existence in remote countries of this or that British custom? The British archaeologist who would intelligently ponder these questions must take account of the work which has been done by Cartailhac, the brothers Siret, Bertrand, Edouard Piette, Salomon Reinach, Montelius, Sophus Müller, Arthur Evans, Ridgeway, Myres, and Flinders Petrie in elucidating the antiquities of France, Spain, Italy, Central Europe, Scandinavia, the Aegean Sea, North Africa, and Egypt; and the British ethnologist cannot afford to be ignorant of what Broca, Hamy, de Quatrefages, Salmon, Hervé, Manouvrier, Virchow, Ranke, and Sergi have done for the ethnology of Europe. Pitt-Rivers saw that ethnography, which informs us about the arts and crafts, the manners and customs of surviving savage tribes, can give archaeology indispensable aid;[10] and all who have compared the contents of the American Room and the Ethnographical Gallery in the British Museum with what they have seen in the Prehistoric Room will believe the Keeper when he assures them that ‘in all probability the resemblance between the perishable productions of the modern savage and those of prehistoric man, which are now lost, was as great as that which undoubtedly exists in the case of implements of stone and bone which have remained’:[11] but in endeavouring to apply their knowledge to the elucidation of the antiquities of a particular country they will not forget to be on their guard. Nor may we neglect the facts which folk-lore societies have in late years so diligently collected; but those who have learned from the great works of Tylor how much of primitive custom still lingers in the depths of modern civilization will become sceptical when they are invited by less sober reasoners to trace the origin of this or that surviving superstition to any one race or tribe or period of the remote past; and readers who have accepted with enthusiastic admiration the seductive theories of _The Golden Bough_ should weigh well the criticism which Sir Alfred Lyall, qualified by intimacy with primitive peoples as well as by a sceptical and cultivated intellect, has published of that brilliant and truly epoch-making book.
