56 True Principles of Archaeology. 



For life is kind, and sweet things grow unbidden, 

 Turning the scenes of strife to verdant bowers ; 



Who shall declare what secrets may lie hidden 

 Beneath that cloud of flowers? 



Poor heart ! above thy field of sorrow sighing 



For smitten faith and love untimely slain, 

 Leave thou the soil wherein thy dead are lying 



To the soft sunlight and the kindly rain. 

 Love works in silence, hiding all the traces 



Of bitter conflict on the trampled sod ; 

 And time shall show thee all the battle places 



Veiled by the hand of God. 



Natural History — Some Advance in Fifty Years. 



By Mr G. F. Scott Elliot, F.R.G.S., F.L.S. 



I shall not, of course, try to describe all the manifold 

 achievements in Science during the past half-century, which 

 would be a terrible task and quite beyond my powers. I 

 shall only pick out here and there some of the salient features 

 of the new country in Science which was first revealed by the 

 genius of Charles Darwin. 



For Darwin's work was, in fact, the discovery of a new 

 country, of whole continents for Science to explore and to 

 make plain, and it is but just to say so whenever one tries to 

 estimate the distance that has been travelled since those days. 



Pre-Darwinian Science was a sort of wilderness, a thorny 

 tangle of preconceived notions, and obscured by a clinging 

 fog of pseudo-theological dogma and mediaeval pedantry. 

 Darwin revealed the scope and the possibilities of the natural 

 sciences. In every one of them some magnificently simple 

 idea, which he was the first to realise, has lighted up much 

 that was obscure or unknown, and pointed out a likely path. 



Some of these ideas (though by no means all of them) 

 have had the most unexpected and astonishing results. Thus, 

 for instance, in South America he noticed and endeavoured 

 to account for the subsidences of the coast line. In those 

 days the Earth was Terra firma of an uncompromising solidity, 

 and no one seems to have seriously questioned such doctrines 





