other, separates man from all those other living creatures that might appear in some respects gifted with endowments akin to his own. Man, as a tool-using artificer, seems to have a rival in the beaver, felling its timber, carrying its clay, and building its dam; in the spider weaving its web, more perfect than any net of human fisher; and even in the squirrel with its provident hoard of well-secured winter store, or the monkey employing the cocoa-nut and other shell-fruit as missiles. But in such artificial appliances there is nothing obsolete, nothing inventive, nothing progressive; whereas the child born amid the most highly developed civilisation,—the son of a Watt, a Stephenson, a Brunel,—if reared from infancy to manhood without any knowledge of mechanical science or the industrial arts, would start anew from the rudimentary instincts of the tool-using animal, and expend his ingenuity, not perhaps without some traces of hereditary mechanical genius, on the primitive materials of flint, stone, horn, or shell. Man depends for all on his teachers; and when moral and intellectual deterioration return him to the toolless condition of the uncivilised nomad, he is thrown back on the resources of his infantile reason and primary instincts, and reaches that point from which the primeval colonist has had to start anew in all lands, and work his way upwards, through stone, and bronze, and iron periods, into the full co-operation of a civilised community, treasuring the experience of the past, and making for itself a new and higher future. The subdivisions of the archæologist designated =The Stone Period=, THE BRONZE PERIOD, and THE IRON PERIOD, have been brought into some discredit, in part by what, as a general system, must be regarded only as a hypothesis, being assumed as involving facts of no less indisputable and universal application than the periods of the geologist. In part, also, their non-acceptance is due to wilful errors of their impugners; and to the want of appreciation of the inevitable characteristics which pertain to transitional periods, such as chiefly come under the European archæologist’s observation. So far as the American Indian is concerned, the New World is in the first transitional stage still: that of a stone-period, very partially affected by the introduction of foreign-wrought weapons and implements; and scarcely indicating, among the numerous tribes of North America, any traces of the adoption of a superinduced native metallurgy. Such therefore appears to be a condition of things, the comparison of which with traces of a corresponding stage in the early ages of Britain, may be of use in clearing the subject from much confusion.