28 The Seventeenth General Meeting, 
perhaps be adopted with advantage. Butin the Blackmore Collection 
the chief object of which is to illustrate the simple arts of the Stone 
Period, and to enable students to study them as tests of human 
culture, in this comparatively limited field of inquiry, I believe that 
our system is as simple, and as intelligible as any which can be 
adopted. 
We do not class our specimens strictly according to material; all 
objects, no matter of what material, if found associated with each other 
or met with under circumstances that justify the belief that they were 
in contemporary use by the same people, are arranged together ; 
and although a few stone implements of the Bronze and Iron Periods 
are placed in the same cases with some which belong to the Stone 
Period, they are placed there only for purposes of comparison and 
illustration, not because they happen to be of a similar material. 
The collection formed by Messrs. Squire and Davis, when it reached 
this country, was classed and catalogued strictly according to material ; 
consequently a group of objects found in a single tumulus, if one speci- 
men was of pottery, another of stone, a third of bone, and a fourth 
of shell, would have been divided from each other and placed in four 
different cases, although collectively they serve to illustrate but one 
incident in the customs of a particular people. These specimens are 
now arranged, as far as is possible, in distinct groups according to the 
tumulus in which they were respectively found, and without any 
reference to the material of which they are composed. 
By limiting our collection to objects illustrative of one branch 
only of a vast subject, there is less to distract the mind, visitors are 
able to study, minutely and in detail, one isolated series of facts, 
and to obtain with facility a general idea of the arts of the Stone 
Period. But having succeeded in doing this, the mind is naturally 
carried from the rude stone implements themselves to the men who 
fashioned them. Then arise such questions as these. Who were 
they? What were they? What was the mental and moral condi- 
tion of these men? Was primeval man a being little above the 
brute? Or was he every whit a man, ignorant as the merest child, 
perchance, as regards the industrial arts, but still in mental power 
a man—and nothing less ? 
