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is, after all, the precious gem for which the archzeologist must search, 
and for which he must not hesitate to grope through heaps of rub- 
bish; and every other science, every other branch of human learn- 
ing, is capable of giving him aid. Sometimes he will of necessity 
becompelled to have recourse to conjecture or to theory; but then, 
he must, in those cases, honestly confess that what he asserts is con- 
jecture only: his theory must be put forward, not as a fixed conclu- 
sion, but as intended to direct inquiry, and to guide to a deeper and 
a wider search. But it is only when that wider search has confirmed 
his theory or his conjecture, that his conclusion can be received as 
a fragment of precious truth, “‘ saved,” as Bacon has expressed it, 
‘‘ from the deluge of time.” 
Will you bear with me for a moment, if I venture to illustrate 
this observation by an example? You all know the remarkable 
fact to which your Museum gives ocular demonstration,—that in 
Ireland we have found, and are still daily finding, an almost incre- 
dible quantity of gold ornaments. A large hoard of these, amount- 
ing in intrinsic value, so far as I can learn, to nearly £2000, was dis- 
covered last year in the cutting of a railway in the county of Clare; 
some of them, your liberality, and the assistance given us by Go- 
vernment, have enabled the Committee of Antiquities to secure for 
your Museum. The discovery of so large a number of these precious 
ornaments in one place is of course of rare occurrence. But scarcely 
a month passes in which some isolated articles of the same kind 
are not found in various parts of the country. Our goldsmiths’ 
windows are full of them, and heaps of them are daily consigned to 
the crucible, because it is impossible to find the means of saving 
them from such a fate. It would be very important and interesting, 
if every goldsmith in Ireland would communicate to this Academy 
the intrinsic value of all the ancient gold which had passed through 
his hands since he had been in business. The result, I have no 
doubt, would astonish most people, and would give us a more defi- 
nite idea of the great extent to which the use of those ornaments 
prevailed among some of the early inhabitants of this country. But 
even without this more accurate statistical return, we know enough 
to be assured, that the use of gold rings, and torques, and circlets, 
must have been a characteristic of some of the aboriginal settlers in 
