22 Prehistoric Races. 



work expended on the material may be better or 

 worse, as chipping the stone is an inferior process 

 to smoothing and polishing it. All this is the sub- 

 ject-matter of archaeology. Finally, as to the loca- 

 tions, these objects, of whatever kind or workman- 

 ship, have been preserved for us, as a general rule, 

 by the successive deposits of soil covering them in 

 the course of time, and thereby " fossilizing" them; 

 that is to say, putting them in the condition that 

 we have to dig them up, or unearth them now. 

 Deposits of soil, or stratification by natural agents, 

 are referred to geology, which thus is called upon 

 to interpret the antiquity of those strata, and there- 

 fore to settle the antiquity and chronology of pre- 

 historic man, whose relics are found in the strata. 



15. We may estimate at once the value of this 

 geological chronology, this determination of time 

 by the computations of geology. 

 Chrouoh^y Whether this science is engaged in con- 

 templating the last sediment deposited 

 right under our eyes in the Mississippi, or in com- 

 puting the time required for the entire formation of 

 the terrestrial globe, it cannot be credited with the 

 qualifications of an exact time-keeper; nor in its 

 practical efforts, when tested by actual observation, 

 has it come out felicitously in its results. The rea- 

 son seems to be that it has a time of its own, in- 

 deed; but geological time is not our historic time; 

 and there is no ascertained formula to make the 

 reduction of one in terms of the other. The meas- 



