We feel persuaded that our author would be unwilling that, in any notice of his work, these explanations should be omitted, and therefore it is that we give them here so prominent a place. For ourselves, so confident are we that scientific truth and religious truth will be found in the end to be inextricably combined, and to be reciprocally sustaining each other, that we are not very solicitous to patch up hasty and perhaps needless reconciliations. At present we have to settle our science; when this is done, it will be time to ask ourselves _what_ it is that needs reconcilement. Although the archæologist can point with triumph to the evidence of successive tombs, or cromlechs, as proving the sequence of his three ages of stone and bronze and iron, he can nowhere carry us back _to the first stone period_, and from this to the first development of the _bronze_ and the _iron_. He can show us that on a certain spot—say the soil on which London stands—there have been generations of men distinguished by the kind of tools they had framed for themselves. But it is the history of men _on that spot_ which his materials enable him to write; they do not enable him to write the history of _the progress of man_ from his earliest condition of existence. For the first men who lived on the banks of the Thames had come, we presume, from other countries; they had had a history, and were the products of some kind of human society before they settled there; and the generations that followed might have received their arts, as in one case we know they did, from foreign nations. It is, after all, therefore, from _a priori_ speculation—from what we infer must have been the course of things—that we describe mankind as proceeding from the rudest modes of existence to the more civilised. The testimony which the archæologist appeals to confirms these speculations; it can do no more. It never brings us to the real history of human art. We have still to guess how men lived at first, whether on the fruits of the earth or by the chase; we have still to guess how men discovered the use of fire, how they elaborated mere vocal signs into a grammatical language; we have still to conjecture when or where the first canoe or the first house was built. We make this remark not to detract from the labours of the archæologist, but simply to put the subject on its right basis. We have nowhere that kind of evidence which takes us back to the first developments of the human intellect; the nature of these must still be matter of inference. We still argue, to a great extent, in a purely speculative manner; we conclude that a progress like that which history and historical monuments enable us to trace, was the kind of progress which the first families of the earth passed through; but we know nothing historically of that early progress.