Now and again this crude and summary judgment is shaken for a little by some wonderful discovery which seems to hint that there is more in archæology than the man in the street had thought. Some Pharaoh, like Tutankhamen, is found “lying in glory, in his own house,” as Isaiah puts it, and the world in general begins to turn in its sleep and dream for a while of the romance of buried treasure. It may be suspected that no small part of the interest awakened with regard to Tutankhamen’s tomb arose from the fact that there was talk of the money value of the find running into millions sterling. A science which can produce assets like that must be worth attention. To tell anyone whose interest has thus been excited that the money value of the find, even if it has not been ridiculously overestimated, as is most likely the case, is the least important aspect of it, absolutely negligible in comparison with its other values, is merely to invite incredulity, polite or otherwise. In any case the temporary interest of the find soon dies away, and the public reverts to its old and normal conception of the archæologist as an amiable and quite harmless lunatic, and of his study as the dullest and dustiest thing under heaven. All this, of course, is just about as wrong, and as stupidly wrong, as anything well can be. It is, indeed, exactly the opposite of the truth. The explorer, instead of being inspired with a malignant disregard for the sap and joy of life, is really so enamoured of these very things that one of his main objects is to endeavour to make the world realise them not only in the present, but for the past also. His purpose, and his business, if he has any real understanding of the end for which Providence created him (for there are some archæologists who have not, and who almost justify the worst that the public can believe of their science), is not the mere gathering of facts, but the reconstruction by means of these of the life of the past, for the interest, the help, and the guidance of the present. His work is not complete until he has presented a picture of that ancient world in which he is interested, not as it is now, a handful of unrelated fragments of dry bone and dusty papyrus and mouldering metal, but as it was when the dry bones were alive, clothed with flesh and inspired with spirit, when the words on the scroll throbbed with the hopes and fears of a living man or woman, and the corroded bronze or iron was a sword in the hand of a mighty man of valour, or a chisel in that of a cunning sculptor. Unless he keeps this in view as his real object, he is misconceiving his whole purpose, and substituting means for ends; unless he can to some extent accomplish this (no man, of course, can do it completely) he is failing of his aim.