118 REPORT—1874. 
I endeavoured, in arranging the antique articles in our Royal Irish Academy, to 
exhibit progress from the simplest and rudest to the most complicate and ornate, 
taking Material and Use as my basis. We have thus presented to us a wide field of 
culture and investigation. Looking back upon my work [ do not regret that ar- 
rangement, the more particularly as in but very few instances indeed can we identify 
the special bronze celt, arrow-head, spear, sword, javelin, or battle-axe with the 
names recorded in the MSS. referring to pre-Christian times. We must he cautious 
in accepting the absolute words of documents transmitted from these times, such as 
those giving descriptions of a memorable fight between two heroes, which state 
that one of them wore among his defensive armour a mill-stone enveloped in a 
silken fabric upon his stomach ! 
Now I do not desire to press any special theory of museum arrangement upon 
this Meeting, but I do wish to impress upon it the necessity for haying some plan 
adopted for educational purposes in Antiquarian Collections. I do not care what 
that arrangement is, provided it is upon a definite plan ; but except for some special 
purpose, or in accordance with the request of the donor, I certainly object to having 
placed in immediate contiguity early bronze shields, antique celts and swords, 
together with crosiers and crucifixes illustrative of the Christian period. 
I care not whether a museum is to be arranged according to the system of my 
old friend and instructor Thomsen, of Copenhagen, as by the stone, bronze, iron, 
and other ‘‘ Ages,” provided such can be faithfully carried out—or whether my own 
system of Material and Use may be adopted; but this I do assert, that in this pre- 
sent age of enlightenment some system should be pursued by which the public 
would be both interested and instructed. I do not think that any Government 
should support a museum that was not properly arranged. 
Instead of entering into the wide domain of Anthropology generally, I shall follow 
the example of my predecessor, Dr. Beddoe, regarding Yorkshire, and confine my 
remarks to the subject of the early races who peopled Ireland in consecutive order, 
their remains still existing, and an inquiry as to what vestiges of those different 
waves of population remain at the present hour. 
To attempt a solution of this question, it is necessary to take a wider area than 
that afforded by an island adjoining the north-west of Europe, but which presents 
the remarkable peculiarity of having been in all probability the last resting-place of a 
section of that great Aryan or Indo-European race which spread from the Euphrates 
to the Polar regions. 
In tracing the footprints of man we have, as I have already stated, to consider the 
relics he left in the various countries which he trod, the vestiges of his language, 
and the physical and psychological characteristics still attaching to his modern repre- 
sentatives. In so doing we must consider the dim traditions, genealogies, heroic 
and bardic tales, rhymes, legends, religions, popular superstitions, folk-lore, 
romances, and all that description of knowledge which has been handed down from 
times denominated Prehistoric to the present day. 
These traditions were in process of time embalmed in annals when the art of 
writing became known, along with the genealogy, the tale, or historic incident, in 
either prose or rhyme, which had been recited by especially instructed and, let me 
add, specially gifted orders of people from age to age. So the Assyrian characters 
cut or embossed on stone or brick preserved the records of conquests. So the ‘Iliad’ 
and the ‘Odyssey’ were no doubt orally transmitted long before letter-words were 
inscribed upon the bark, the palm-leaf, the papyrus, the waxen tablet, or the vellum. 
They were thus kept alive in the minds of the people, and largely helped to pre- 
serve the Greek language until it performed one of its greatest duties, nearly nine- 
teen centuries ago, in the wide-spread diffusion of the records of Christianity. 
There was a time when a large portion of the plains and non-mountainous parts 
of Europe were tangled forests traversed by great rivers rupning generally towards 
the south and west. According to Norwegian authorities, the Lapps were the 
primeval race on our Continent, and were driven northward by each successive wave 
of population that, creeping round the shores of the Caspian, the Black Sea, and the 
Mediterranean, or passing out between the hills of Ceuta and Gibraltar (then called 
the “ Pillars of Hercules ”), came along the shores of Spain, Gaul, and Belgium. 
That the skin-clad man with his stone, bone, and wooden weapons and tools, his 
