119 
Ordinary Meeting, March 24th, 1874. 
Kev. William Gaskell, M.A., Vice-President, in the Chair. 
“ On some of the Perplexities which the Art and Archi- 
tecture of the Present are preparing for the Historians and 
Antiquarians of the Future,” by the Rev. Bkooke Herford. 
One of the most interesting elements in historical and 
antiquarian studies is the consideration of the age of the 
various remains which have come down to us from the past. 
It continually occurs that points of great importance depend 
upon our being able to assign an approximate date to a 
document, an inscription, or some architectural feature of a 
building. It is thus that vague tradition is often eked out 
by corroborative fact, and questionable chronicles become 
susceptible of verification. Even in cases in which it is out 
of the question to assign actual dates, it is something to be 
able to be sure of the general period to which an object 
belongs ; and even the iron, bronze, and stone periods 
afford distant landmarks by which we may grope our way 
back into an antiquity which may not always be so dim as 
it is at present. 
Now all who have gone into the study of the dates or 
periods of ancient remains or monuments, must have been 
struck by one feature which is almost universally character- 
istic of them. I refer to the marvellous reliability of 
whatever indications they carry in themselves of style or 
stage of development. Once get back beyond a certain 
borderland of confusion and deception, and almost every- 
thing speaks for itself You can tell — approximately, of 
course — when it was done, by the Iwiu it is done. The fact 
is that as the arts of life gradually developed men did 
Pboceedings. — Lit. &Phil. Society. — Y ol. XIII. — Xo. 11 — Session 1873-4. 
