SCANDINAVIAN ARCHAEOLOGY. 673 



This proposition, ahvady clearly enunciated in 1813, and now recog- 

 nized everywhere as a fundamental truth of prehistoric archaeology, 

 was not however generally accepted at once in Denmark; the mate- 

 rials accumulated in the museum were not yet numerous enough for 

 the truth to be obvious to the eyes of all. It was only in Sweden that 

 some authors admitted the theory' of Mr. Vedel-Simonsen ; in Denmark 

 his ideas were for a long time only a sort of prophecy of what every- 

 body was going to accept. The man who was to draw from the archte- 

 ological finds, and from the antiquities themselves, the incontestable 

 proofs of this theory and to secure its recognition throughout the entire 

 world was Christian Jurgensen Thomsen, for fifty years the director 

 of thePre-historic Museum of Copenhagen, which he raised to the rank 

 of the first institution of that kind in Europe ; he has been called the 

 father of the pre-historic archteology of the l!^orth. In 181G he suc- 

 ceeded Mr. Nyerup as secretary of the arclu^ological commission and 

 as director of the museum, a i^osition which he held uniil his death, in 

 18G5. This remarkable man was truly self-taught, — originally a mer- 

 chant without erudition, and for that matter little enough attached to 

 books, — but he had verj" extraordinary natural gifts, an observing mind, 

 and a very delicate perception of objects of art and of antiquities. He 

 was an excellent numismatist and a good connoisseur in art. His 

 trained eye and his fine perception of the style and of the character- 

 istic details of ancient objects permitted him to arrive at a more pro- 

 found knowledge of pre historic antiquities. For him the aim was no 

 longer to seek to determine and to illustrate prehistoric objects by the 

 interpretation of traditions. Through him, as well as through the 

 young men who attached themselves to this acute connoisseur and to 

 his rich museum, pre-historic archieology became a study of the antiq- 

 uities themselves; they understood that a knowledge of the very re- 

 mote times to which these antiquities ascend is only obtained from 

 these contemporary remains by the empirical path and by an inductive 

 method. 



Mr. Thomsen mainly exerted his intiuence by his labors inside of the 

 museum. It was in 1819, that he began to open the latter to the public 

 for a few hours each week; he was always there himself to instruct 

 visitors. In this way he succeeded by degrees in conquering for the 

 Archaeological museum a place in the national interests. In the classi- 

 fication and exposition of antiquities he was ever making progress. 

 Very early there began to form in him the knowledge of the three great 

 periods of the development of civilization, and of the way in which an 

 archaeological museum should be arranged conformably to this principle. 

 What Mr. Yedel-Simonsen had declared on that subject ten years be- 

 fore does not seem at once to have convinced him. From 1825, how- 

 ever, he expounded to Professor Keyser, of Chiistiania, his ideas ui)0n 

 the classification of a pre-historic collection on tlie basis of this chrono- 

 logical principle. We know that he had already, in 1830, realized this 



