STUDY OF HIGH ANTIQUITY IN EUROPE. 403 
author points out the striking uniformity of the bronze weapons in different 
parts of Europe, and this leads him to the conclusion that the civilization of 
that period must have spread from one and the same centre, situated, probably, 
somewhere on the borders of the Mediterranean. The author further remarks, 
that the introduction of bronze, as also, later, the introduction of iron, coinciding 
with an essential change in the mode of burial, betrays a profound change, each 
time, in the religious system. Hence the conclusion, that each of those periods 
was marked by the invasion of a new race, or, to use the author’s own terms, 
by afresh wave of population; for we can hardly imagine that nations would be 
brought to change their religion, simply because they had acquired a new metal. 
The considerable amount of labor required by the publication of his Scandi- 
navian fauna obliged Professor Nilsson to abandon the field of archeological 
inquiry. But he had laid the broad and solid foundations of that combination of 
researches into the past and present state of mankind, which deserves to be 
acknowledged as a science of its own, under the denomination he proposed, of 
Comparative Ethnography. Nilsson has achieved in this branch what Cuvier 
has done for palzeontology, when he applied his principles of comparative anatomy 
to the study of fossil bones.** These two great men have both developed and 
applied the true method; and this is much more important than any brilliant 
discovery, a good method being the most powerful instrument of discovery, as 
Cuvier himself remarked. 
To the Swede Nilsson and to the Dane Thomsen, happily both still among 
the living, we are thus indebted for a good method, bringing archeology within 
the pale of natural science, and for a practical classification, based on the form 
and matter, and on the use of the relics of the past—that is, on positive facts, 
relative to industry and arts. 
The classification into three ages—of the stone, the bronze, and the iron—reealls 
to mind the distinction established by Werner and his contemporaries of the 
geological formations, into Primary, Secondary and Tertiary. It has been equally 
useful, for it began to introduce order into the chaos of antiquities of all ages, 
thrown indiscriminately together in the museums, so as to cause these to look 
more like curiosity-shops than like scientific establishments. 
* Retired from his professorship, Mr. Nilsson has again taken up archeology. Heis now 
publishing a new and much enlarged edition of his Scandinavian Aborigines. A German 
translation of this new edition is appearing at Hamburg. 
