The idea which associates man’s intellectual elevation with the accompaniments of mechanical skill, as though they stood somehow in the relation of cause and effect, and with the intellectual as the offspring, instead of the parent, of the mechanical element, is the product of modern thought. The very element which begets the unintellectual condition of the savage is that his whole energies are expended, and all his thoughts are absorbed, in providing daily food and clothing, and the requisite tools by which those are to be secured; or where, as in the luxuriant islands of Polynesia, nature seems to provide all things to his hand, his degraded moral nature unparadises the Eden of the bread-fruit tree. A primeval “Stone period” appears to underlie the most remote traces of European civilisation; and not only to carry back the evidence of man’s presence to times greatly more remote than any hitherto conceived of, but to confirm the idea that his earliest condition was one not only devoid of metallurgy, but characterised by mechanical arts of the very simplest kind. But it does not necessarily follow that he was in a condition of intellectual dormancy. The degradation of his moral nature, and not the absence of the arts which we associate with modern luxury and enterprise, made him a savage. The Arab sheikh, wandering with his flocks over the desert, is not greatly in advance of the Indian of the American forests, either in mechanical skill or artistic refinement; yet the Idumean Job was just such a pastoral Arab, but, nevertheless, a philosopher and a poet, far above any who dwelt amid the wondrous developments of mechanical and artistic progress in the cities of the Tigris or the Euphrates. It is not to be inferred, however, that the whole history of the human race is affirmed by the archæologist to disclose a regular succession of periods—Stone, Bronze, and Iron, or however otherwise designated,—akin to the organic disclosures of geology; or that where their traces are found they necessarily imply such an order in their succession. The only true analogy between the geologist and the archæologist is, that both find their evidence imbedded in the earth’s superficial crust, and deduce the chronicles of an otherwise obliterated past by legitimate induction therefrom. The radical difference between the palæontologist and the ethnologist lies in this, that the one aims at recovering the history of unintelligent divisions of extinct life; the other investigates all that pertains to a still existing, intelligent being, capable of advancing from his own past condition, or returning to it, under the most diverse external circumstances.