The subject pertains directly to the advancement of the race. Indeed, it is to the measure of this advancement I shall ask your attention. There is no doubt about the advancement. There are some people who believed and believe that man began in a state of high development and has since then degenerated into his present condition. The belief in some period of Arcadian simplicity and human perfection is still to be found in some remote nooks and crannies of the learned world; but those minds who have been trained in archæological studies and in ethnographic observations know well that when we go back to the most ancient deposits, in which we find any sign of man at all on the globe, we find also the proofs that man then lived in the rudest possible condition of savagery. He has, little by little, through long centuries and millenniums of painful struggle, survived in made his weapons and his most effective tools for the time being would be a good criterion to go by, because these weapons and tools enabled him to conquer not only the wild beasts around him and his fellow man also, but nature as well. These materials are three in number. They particularly apply to European archæology, but, in a general way, to the archæology of all continents. The one is stone, which gave man material for the best cutting edge which he could make for very many millenniums of his existence. After that, for a comparatively short period, he availed himself of bronze—of the mixture of copper and tin called bronze—an admixture giving a considerable degree of hardness and therefore allowing polish and edge making. The bronze age was not long anywhere. It was succeeded by that metal which, beyond all others, has been of signal utility to man—iron. We live in the iron age, and it is from iron in some of its forms and products that all our best weapons and materials for implements, etc., are derived. We have, therefore, the ages of stone, of bronze and of iron. These are the measures, from an artistic source, of the advancement of human culture; and they certainly bear a distinct relation to all man's other conditions at the time. A tribe which had never progressed beyond the stone age—which had no better material for its weapons and implements than stone—could never proceed beyond a very limited point of civilization. Bronze or any metal which can be moulded, hammered and sharpened of course gives a nation vast superiority over one which uses stone only; and the value of iron and steel for the same purposes I need not dwell upon.