592 THE :methods of arch^ological research. 



after a long period of stagiiatioij, it was a spoutaueous movement from 

 withiD. We now know that m almost every case tliis rejuvenescence 

 Avas due to contact with some new ideas which came in from the outside. 

 A new graft into tlie old tree was the real source of better fruit. 



Let us take some examples. When the Mongols, Avho were then 

 masters of China, conquered Persia, they imported great numbers of 

 Persian workmen, and the result was a complete change in the decora 

 tion of Chinese porcelain. The vases made by the Moors at Majorca 

 and Valencni were i)robably the immediate daughters of the art fabrics 

 of Egyjit. and were certainly the mothers of Italian majolica. The 

 blaze of flowers and ribbons which suddenly broke out this j'ear in the 

 hats and bonnets of English women, without any apparent motive, can 

 be traced to the influence of a famous city on the banks of the Seine, 

 where an explanation of the change is forthcoming. The Japanese are 

 said to have lost their eye for color and form because their old art has 

 changed recently for the worse. They have been, in fact, inoculated 

 with European taste, as they have been flooded with European products. 

 The story is apparently universal. We see the river come out of its 

 mountain fountain and flow down blue and sparkling. Presently we 

 find the color of its water change to milky white, and realize an exifla- 

 nation when we trace the new color to some aftluent watering another 

 soil which has come and joined its waters; and sometimes, as in the 

 case of the Rhone after it enters Lake Geneva, the milky and the blue 

 streams flow side by side, as the new bonnets and hats of every fantastic 

 shape and color are mingled with older and more chaste designs on 

 older and more sensible people. The great lesson of all this is continuity. 



Again, to take another illustration from natural history, a lesson of 

 these later times in archieology has been that of •' survival." We find 

 all kinds of archaic survivals — in our speech, in our fairy stories, in our 

 clothes, everywhere, in fact — crystallized bowlders of older strata of 

 human life, which have been preserved accidentally in another matrix, 

 and to those who are willing to read their lesson, reflecting unmistak- 

 able features of another time. When we see the Italian peasant going 

 on pilgrimages to different altars of Our Lady to be cured of different 

 human ills, are we not reminded of the similar practices in an age 

 when Venus and her shrines were scattered over the same country, and 

 each shrine had its own Venus, just as each altar has its own "Lady" 

 endowed with difl'erent healing powers? How^ curious it is to go to a 

 Kermiss in some old Butch town, such as Middleburg, or Delft, to see 

 the women with their- curiously shaped lace caps, and to be told that 

 it is quite possible to distinguish the lioman Catholic families from the 

 the Protestant ones, the distinction in the caps having arisen in the 

 fiercer days of the sixteenth century. AVe may then examine the bags 

 full of curiously shaped and colored cakes sold in the booths, and see 

 the roundabouts and rude swing boats loaded with i)erfectly sane peo- 

 l)le, many of them (iO or 70 years old ; and then turn to Tenier's great 



