PHASES OF HISTOEY. 
367 
proclivities. Pro-historic archaeology revealed primitive man little 
removed above the brute in physical needs or in intelligence, yet 
evidencing, in his treatment of his dead, the germs of feelings, 
hopes, and fears, which carried with them the promise of great 
things beyond. ]So deed was ever lost, and the world not more 
surely bore the impress of the geologic changes through which it 
had passed than it did the traces of human action. The earliest 
races of man had left little but their graves ; but these, rightly 
considered, were wells of the fullest and the truest information 
concerning the characteristics, mental and moral, of their silent 
tenants, and the physical nature of their surroundings. As they 
descended the stream of time, the materials of the unrecorded history 
of man rapidly increased. They found not only graves but dwell- 
ings; and, oddest feature of all, turned scavengers and ransacked 
the refuse heaps hard by. There was not much poetry about a 
dust-bin ; but it was astonishing what a halo of romance surrounded 
a kitchen midden. And, taking a leap over many centuries, they 
had an unsystematized history of England in the English common 
speech ; and that even was a mere dead letter compared with those 
suggestive relics of the past — customs, outworn creeds, obsolete 
superstitions — which had yet a kind of dubious or unrecognized 
existence, and some of which had been so aptly termed 11 survivals." 
"Wonderful was the vitality which attached to almost everything 
that any considerable body of mankind had agreed to think or do. 
After quoting a number of striking instances of "survivals," 
current in every day life, the lecturer concluded by saying that his 
motive had been twofold. First, that, by an elucidation of the 
nature and progress of history, he might inculcate the necessity 
for something like independence of thought in consulting their 
historians. Second, that by pointing out how the materials of the 
most vital history of the past were not merely found in musty 
muniment rooms, in chaotic archives, among dusty parchments, 
but lay scattered on every hand, — he might direct attention to the 
suggestiveness of common things. History was everywhere ; and 
nothing could be really unimportant or uninteresting that had once 
been important or interesting to any portion of the human race. 
And he laid the more stress upon this because there was a danger 
in these days of rightful devotion to science, lest, in contemplating 
the great world of nature, they might be all too regardless of the 
little world of humanity. 
