ARCHAEOLOGY. 373 



industriously to search for them, which would in nowise prevent us 

 from receiving with gratitude the gifts sent to us from other countries. 

 The collection of antiquities numbers about seven hundred objects. 

 Of that number one hundred are foreign to Switzerland ; most of the 

 others have been found in the canton of Yaud, and seventy-two be- 

 long to a time anterior to the Roman domination in Helvetia. 

 Although this collection is not very large, it yet possesses many arti- 

 cles Avell worthy the attention of antiquaries. 



ETHNOLOGICAL COLLECTION. 



This collection is devoted to the exhibition of the products of 

 modern industry among peoples strangers to civilization, properly so 

 called. The interest which belongs to this species of study consists 

 not so much in the forms, more or less original, of arms, utensils, and 

 ornaments, as in the diversity in the degrees of contemporaneous 

 development, and in the connexion of the series with that of the 

 successive phases of civilization through past centuries. The produc- 

 tions of people who at the present day are without knowledge 

 of the metals enable us to form a more complete idea of the pro- 

 gress made in bygone ages by an industry which was equally without 

 the metals. On the other hand, the analogy of the forms and pro- 

 cesses employed in ancient and modern times shows us that the 

 savage state is in reality only the extension of the age of stone, 

 but it is important to prove that every stationary state is a state of 

 degradation. And accordingly the lacustrian peoples, even in the 

 most remote antiquity, differed in very many respects from the 

 existing savage. We see among the earliest population of Eu- 

 rope the same lack of materials, but even in their early age that 

 population progressively developed its industry. One of the chief 

 causes of the stationary state is the immobility of ideas arising from 

 the want of communication which constitutes the isolation that is 

 always hostile to progess. Isolation had the same effect upon the 

 first emigrants into the west as upon the savages of our own time, 

 but with this difference, that with the former the conditions of exist- 

 ence changed, while with the latter they remained the unchanged and 

 the insurmountable barriers to progress. Like causes produce 

 like effects, and we may affirm in general terms that man placed under 

 analogous conditions of existence acts in an analogous manner, inde- 

 pendently of both time and place. For this reason the study of the 

 various degrees of contemporaneous industry serves to throw new 

 light upon that of anterior ages. The astonishing variety of industrial 

 products, in ancient as well as in modern times, proceeds from general 

 laws, the application of which, in substance the same, proves in a very 

 striking manner the unity of the human mind. 



Our collections are, doubtless, very insufficient to justify these 

 observations to their full extent, but it is to this result that they must 

 tend if they are to have a really scientific value. 



It will suffice to indicate, according to the places of their origin, 

 the objects collected in the museum, to note some of those resem- 



