166 GROWTH AND DECLINE OF CULTURE. 



the tally." It is true that the notched Exchequer tally had 

 long had a Latin inscription on it, and at last there was given 

 into the bargain a fair English receipt, written on a separate 

 paper. The tally survives still, not only in the broken six- 

 pence, and in the bargains of peasants in outlying districts,-^ 

 but in the counterfoil of the banker's cheque. Some evidence 

 of this ceremonial keeping up of arts superseded in private 

 life, will be given in the chapters on the Stone Age and Fire- 

 making. 



Such helps as these in working out the problem of the Origin 

 and Progress of Culture grow scarcer as we descend among 

 the lower races, and those of which we have little or no his- 

 torical knowledge. Mere observation of arts in use, and of 

 objects belonging to tribes living or dead, forms at present the 

 bulk of the evidence of the history of their culture accessible 

 to us. Of these records an immense mass has been collected, 

 but they are very hard to read. 



Sometimes, indeed, an object carries its history written in 

 its form, as some of the Esquimaux knives brought to England 

 which are carved out of a single piece of bone, in imitation of 

 European knives with handles, and show that the maker was 

 acquainted with those higher instruments, though he had not 

 the iron to make a blade of, or even a few scraps to fix along 

 the edge of the bone blade, as they so often do. 



The keeping up in stone architecture of designs belonging 

 to wooden buildings, furnishes conclusive proofs of the growth, 

 in several countries, of the art of building in stone from the 

 art of building in wood, — an argument which is used with ex- 

 traordinary clearness and power in Mr. Fergusson's Handbook. 

 In Central America and Asia Minor there are still to be seen 

 stone buildings more or less entirely copied from wooden con- 

 structions, while in Egypt a like phenomenon may be traced in 

 structures belonging to the remote age of the pyramids. The 

 student may see, almost as if he had been standing by when 

 they were built, how the architect, while adopting the new 

 material, began by copying from the wooden structures to 

 which he had been accustomed. Speaking of the Lycian tombs 



' Pictet, 'Origines,' part ii. p. 425. 



