2S 



The Seventeenth General Meeting, 



perhaps be adopted with advantage. But in the Blackmore Collection 

 the chief object of which is to illustrate the simple arts of the Stone 

 Period, and to enable students to study them as tests of human 

 culture, in this comparatively limited field of inquiry, I believe that 

 our system is as simple, and as intelligible as any which can be 

 adopted. 



We do not class our specimens strictly according to material ; all 

 objects, no matter of what material, if found associated with each other 

 or met with under circumstances that justify the belief that they were 

 in contemporary use by the same people, are arranged together ; 

 and although a few stone implements of the Bronze and Iron Periods 

 are placed in the same cases with some which belong to the Stone 

 Period, they are placed there only for purposes of comparison and 

 illustration, not because they happen to be of a similar material. 

 The collection formed by Messrs. Squire and Davis, when it reached 

 this country, was classed and catalogued strictly according to material; 

 consequently a group of objects found in a single tumulus, if one speci- 

 men was of pottery, another of stone, a third of bone, and a fourth 

 of shell, would have been divided from each other and placed in four 

 different cases, although collectively they serve to illustrate but one 

 incident in the customs of a particular people. These specimens are 

 now arranged, as far as is possible, in distinct groups according to the 

 tumulus in which they were respectively found, and without any 

 reference to the material of which they are composed. 



By limiting our collection to objects illustrative of one branch 

 only of a vast subject, there is less to distract the mind, visitors are 

 able to study, minutely and in detail, one isolated series of facts, 

 and to obtain with facility a general idea of the arts of the Stone 

 Period. But having succeeded in doing this, the mind is naturally 

 carried from the rude stone implements themselves to the men who 

 fashioned them. Then arise such questions as these. Who were 

 they ? What were they ? What was the mental and moral condi- 

 tion of these men ? Was primeval man a being little above the 

 brute ? Or was he every whit a man, ignorant as the merest child, 

 perchance, as regards the industrial arts, but still in mental power 

 a man — and nothing less ? 



