The objects of antiquarian research embrace events and periods, many of which are placed within the era of written evidence; but many more are of a date long anterior to the epoch when man made that greatest of human discoveries--the discovery, namely, of the power of permanently recording words, thoughts, and acts, in symbolical and alphabetic writing. To some minds it has seemed almost chimerical for the archaeologist to expect to regain to any extent a knowledge of the conditions and circumstances of man, and of the different nations of men, before human cunning had learned to collect and inscribe them on stone or brass, or had fashioned them into written or traditional records capable of being safely floated down the stream of time. But the modern history of Archaeology, as well as the analogies of other allied pursuits, are totally against any such hopeless views. Almost within the lifetime of some who are still amongst us, there has sprung up and been cultivated--and cultivated most successfully too--a science which has no written documents or legible inscriptions to guide it on its path, and whose researches are far more ancient in their object than the researches of Archaeology. Its subject is an antiquity greatly older than human antiquity. It deals with the state of the earth and of the inhabitants of the earth in times immeasurably beyond the earliest times studied by the antiquary. In the course of its investigations it has recovered many strange stories and marvellous chronicles of the world and of its living occupants--long, long ages before human antiquity even began. But if Geology has thus successfully restored to us long and important chapters in the pre-Adamite annals of the world's history, need Archaeology despair of yet deciphering and reading--infinitely more clearly than it has yet done--that far later episode in the drama of the past which opens with the appearance of man as a denizen of earth. The modes of investigating these two allied and almost continuous sciences--Geology and Archaeology--are the same in principle, however much the two sciences themselves may differ in detail. And if Geology, in its efforts to regain the records of the past state of animal and vegetable life upon the surface of the earth, has attractions which bind the votaries of it to its ardent study, surely Archaeology has equal, if not stronger claims to urge in its own behoof and favour. To the human mind the study of those relics by which the archaeologist tries to recover and reconstruct the history of the past races and nations of man, should naturally form as engrossing a topic as the study of those relics by which the geologist tries to regain the history of the past races and families of the _fauna_ and _flora_ of the ancient world. Surely, as a mere matter of scientific pursuit, the ancient or fossil states of man should--for man himself--have attractions as great, at least, as the ancient or fossil states of