128 Dr Hodgkin on the Progress of Ethnology. 



pre-Adamic race, make it evident that the barbarous inhabi* 

 tants of regions now the most civilised, were, in some striking 

 particulars, very similar to uncivilised races now existing, 

 whose origin and connexion with other families of man can be 

 made the subject of research. 



When we come to another division of the subject, which 

 appears to be more recent in point of time, in which we have 

 abundantly more numerous data, not only in more numerous 

 relics of human remains, of works of art, of tradition, and even 

 of history, but specimens of language, and of evidences of re- 

 ligious belief, we necessarily find the subject much more com- 

 plicated ; and if the means of arriving at truth are more avail- 

 ing and decisive, the temptations to conjecture, and the in- 

 ducements to bias opinion, are much more numerous, varied, 

 and powerful. It is this department of ethnology which should 

 take in the whole globe, at the same time that it should pro- 

 mote the most minute local research. It evinces the necessity 

 for a more extensive archseology than appears to have been 

 as yet contemplated. Hitherto the divided efforts of anti- 

 quarians have been very much taken up with research de- 

 signed to increase the local interest of a single nation, or per- 

 haps the part of a nation — a town or village. 



It is not my object to underrate such antiquarian labour ; 

 but I am anxious to see greater attention to a more compre- 

 hensive archaeology, which may embrace the scattered mate- 

 rials thus laboriously brought out by local inquirers, and bear 

 the same relation to them that universal botany does to the 

 study of the flora of a particular district. 



A single illustration will not merely render my object 

 more intelligible, but will serve to shew that its attainment 

 is not chimerical, and that important progress is already 

 made in the work. Let us suppose the local antiquarian to 

 be confining his patient research to that which our own city 

 (London) may present. He may find the traces of the age of 

 tumuli, and flint axes, in the occasional remains which the 

 workman turns up in sinking a well, or making a sewer. He 

 wdll find that his predecessors in this research have recorded 

 similar discoveries, and he will perhaps regard the celebrated 

 London stone, and the site of St Paul's, as possessing an in* 



