463 
names are honourably recorded wherever their labours have 
been made known. But there is another and special subject 
of embarrassment peculiar to myself. It is well known to 
me that a learned friend and colleague of mine has on a 
former occasion been called upon to address you with re- 
gard to the Collection of the Royal Irish Academy, and 
that the opinions which he on that occasion gave utter- 
ance to were put upon record, and circulated to a certain 
extent with the authority of the Academy itself, from ap- 
pearing in one of their publications. I regret to say, that I 
hold very different opinions from my friend Dr. Worsaae; 
and that from the conviction that the adoption of his opinions, 
and the pushing them to their legitimate consequences, would 
betray us into grave historical errors, I feel it my duty on 
_ this occasion to protest as publicly against them as he himself 
gave utterance to them. I think anybody who follows the 
train of thought of the archeologists of Northern Germany, 
and more especially what that amiable and accomplished 
scholar, Dr. Lisch, has raised upon the foundations laid by the 
 savans of Denmark, will agree with me that those gentlemen 
are led into a historical reductio ad absurdum. I have myself 
heard Dr. Lisch declare, in the meeting of the Central Archzo- 
logical Association of Germany held at Dresden, under the 
presidency of his Majesty the present King of Saxony, that 
the Germans were totally unacquainted with the use of iron, 
_ and that this was first introduced into the provinces of the 
Baltic by the Sclavonic tribes in the eighth century. Errors 
like these are hardly to be excused, and are perfectly unintel- 
- ligible in any classical scholar. Now, I do not deny that there 
_ is a great convenience in -the division adopted by the savans 
: of Denmark, into the products of a Stone, a Bronze, and an 
Iron period. I believe that this has some foundation in his- 
torical truth, and I am perfectly aware of its value in the 
_ ¢o-ordination and arrangement of a museum. Itis, however, 
no novelty: the main characteristics of the principle were re- 
VOL. VI. 2uU 
