The archæology and prehistoric annals of Scotland — John Shaqi
The archæology and prehistoric annals of ScotlandWilson, Daniel, Sir
History
The archæology and prehistoric annals of Scotland
Wilson, Daniel, Sir
Scotland -- Antiquities
It has fared otherwise with Archæology. Rejected in its first appeal
for a place among the sister sciences, its promoters felt themselves
under no necessity to court a share in popular favour which they
could readily command, and we have accordingly its annual congresses
altogether apart from those of the associated sciences. Archæology,
however, has suffered from the isolation; while it cannot but be
sooner or later felt to be an inconsistency at once anomalous and
pregnant with evil, which recognises as a legitimate branch of British
science, the study of the human species, by means both of physiological
and philological investigation, but altogether excludes the equally
direct evidence which Archæology supplies. It rests, however, with
the archæologist to assert for his own study its just place among the
essential elements of scientific induction, and to shew that it not
only furnishes valuable auxiliary truth in aid of physiological and
philological comparisons, but that it adds distinct psychological
indices by no other means attainable, and yields the most trustworthy,
if not the sole evidence in relation to extinct branches of the human
family, the history of which possesses a peculiar national and personal
interest for us.
Meanwhile the close relations which subsist between the researches
of the ethnologist and the archæologist, and the perfect unity of
their aims, have been recognised by Nillson, Eschricht, and other
distinguished men in various countries; and while the two sciences
have advanced together, in harmony and with mutual advantage,
Scandinavian archæologists have given an impetus to the study of
Primitive Antiquities, which has already done much to establish
its value as the indispensable basis of all written history. The
facilities afforded to the Scandinavian archæologist by the purity of
his primitive remains, and the freedom of his ethnographic chronicles
from those violent intercalations of foreign elements which render
both the ethnology and the historical antiquities of Central Europe
so complicated and difficult of solution, peculiarly fitted him for
originating a comprehensive yet well-defined system. The comparatively
recent close of the Scandinavian primitive periods has preserved in a
more complete form those evidences by which we recover the knowledge
of the first rude colonists of Europe, whose records are distorted
and nearly effaced within the wide pale of Roman sway. The isolation,
moreover, of these northern kingdoms preserved them from being the
mere highway of the first Asiatic nomades. Whatever traces of early
wanderers they retain are well-defined, so that to them we may look
for clear and satisfactory evidence in illustration of one portion
at least of the primal north-western tide of migration from which
the origin of all European history dates. It chances, however, from
various accidental causes, that the revival of archæological research
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