368 ARCHEOLOGY. 



naturally fall into subdivisions corresponding to the various ages to 

 which they belong; the others, few in number in comparison, are 

 classed according to the countries from which they come. 



The interest that attaches to these relics arises not merely from 

 their greater or less antiquity, or from their art, more or less perfect, 

 but far more from their being the expression of the different degrees 

 of ancient civilization. Thus the articles discovered in Switzerland 

 give us the history of the state of industry in ancient Helvetia, and 

 those which came from abroad furnish us with an idea of the develop- 

 ment peculiar to other lands than our own. Certain of those articles 

 are all the more precious because they belong to an age anterior to 

 the earliest written documents, and allow us, in the absence of these, 

 to reconstruct the history of the early ages of humanity, just as geology 

 enables us to retrace the history of our globe by the study of its strata 

 and its fossils. 



The ethnological collection includes the productions of the industry 

 of modern tribes who, as yet, are strangers to European civilization. 

 It is very closely connected with antiquities because, equally with 

 them, it tells us the story of the various degrees of development 

 through which men pass ere they attain to civilization properly so 

 called. We may safely affirm that the various degrees of present 

 human development characterize the successive phases of that de- 

 velopment in antiquity. It is easy to appreciate the civilization of a 

 people according to the character of mineral materials used in its 

 industry; and there is a long series to pass through from the savage 

 who supplies the want of metals by the use of stone and bone to the 

 people who use the most various materials. Placing ourselves at that 

 point of view, we perceive that the greater the use of the metals, and 

 especially of iron, among a people, the greater is their industrial de- 

 velopment. The application of these observations to antiquity is 

 fertile in unforeseen results. The articles discovered being classed 

 according to the materials employed and the manner of working them 

 up will furnish us with series which, taken in the same country, will 

 indicate the successive phases of that country's civilization. We 

 shall find one age in which, just as among the savages, stone supplied 

 the place of the metals. In another age, copper, tin, gold, and a little 

 silver will be employed for ornaments and for various instruments, as 

 among the Mexicans before the discovery of Columbus. In a third 

 age iron will be superadded to the materials previously known and 

 used, and it is then, and not until then, that we find writing is intro- 

 duced and get the first historical data. The Helvetians had the arts 

 of writing and of using iron in the time of Julius Ca3sar, and our first 

 historical traditions are no older, although, at that date, a great many 

 generations had succeeded each other in our country. 



These general considerations suffice to give an idea of the kind of 

 interest possessed by antiquarian and ethnological collections which 

 are, as it were, a picture of human progress, studied in one case in 

 the series of successive ages, in the other in the series of contempo- 

 rary nations. Let us now see how far our collections exhibit this 

 double series. 



