THE METHODS OF ARCHJiOLOGICAL KESEARCH. 593 



pictures at Amsterdam, and see precisely the same cakes and the same 

 roiiudabouts fioured there! Are not the wooden houses colored with 

 red ocher which dot the Chrisenier the very same as were introduced 

 by the Dutch there in the grand old days of the iSTorwegian herring- 

 fishing in the seventh century ? Are not the bull fights in Spain direct 

 survivals of the exhibitions in the circus, no doubt introduced every- 

 where by the Romans, just as Spain was the most essentially Roman 

 of all the colonies? 



Have we not our own fossil customs everywhere! The aldermen and 

 the common councilors of London when decked in their state robes 

 might be living in the Plantagenet times, and the beefeaters in the 

 time of Henry VIII. The two ridiculous buttons at the back of our 

 coats and the bands we barristers wear are useless relics of once useful 

 garments, the one dating from the time when there was necessity for 

 butt(»niiig back the Haps of the long coats wlieu'George III was king 

 and the other renmins of the long collars of King James's time. Are 

 not our judges' wigs directly traceable to the baldness of Louis XIV"? 

 These useless things, like the many useless and monstrous and offensive 

 adjectives used by cabmen and sometimes by schoolboys, are mere sur- 

 vivals of things once usefully put on. The games played by the school 

 children in the gutter preserve the ritual of primeval worship and the 

 social customs of x^rimeval times. Hence, as I have always urged, it 

 becomes important and interesting not only to trace the origin of things, 

 but also their final departure. Our dictionary makers are the most 

 diligent hunters of the first usage of words. Would it not be wise if 

 they were also to record the last use of the obsolete words, the dying- 

 flicker of a living light ? The very fact we are referring to has sometimes 

 perverted archaeological reasoning. Because the Shetland islanders 

 still use stone lamps and cups, it does not follow, as some have urged, 

 that a Stone Age in Britain is entirely a mistake. It only means, of 

 course, that in remote corners the very old art has lived on, just as in 

 the names of the old mountains and rivers the language of the earliest 

 inhabitants has frequently been preserved. These touches of poetry 

 in our very prosaic lives are as much fossil relics of an old historical 

 horizon as the fossils which have been found by the German geologists 

 in the far-traveled limestone bowlders which strew their country, and 

 belong to an age not directly represented in the solid strata of the dis- 

 trict. The lessons we are discussing are notably prominent in the more 

 recent works on philology, in which loan words and terms foreign to 

 the language have been carefully sifted out, and we have thus been 

 enabled to find not only the origin of many arts and customs but the 

 stage and culture at which different connected races had arrived at tlie 

 time when they separated. This we can do by comparing their common 

 names for homely or other objects. The same with folklore, and the 

 same witli the rituals of different religions, all of them being among- 

 the most conservative institutions. This multiplication of avenues by 

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