The visitor to the British Museum passes through galleries containing fossil relics of the secondary and tertiary geological periods--the gigantic evidences of former life, the tropical fauna of the carboniferous system, and all the organic and inorganic proofs by which we are guided in investigating the physical changes, and classifying the extinct beings, that pertained to the older world of which they speak. Thence he proceeds to galleries filled with the inscribed sarcophagi and obelisks, the votive tablets, the sculptured altars, deities, or historic decorations of Assyria, Egypt, India, Greece, and Rome, relics which belong no less to extinct, though newer systems and orders of being. "The antiquities," says an eminent geologist, when instituting a nearly similar comparison, "piece on in natural sequence to the geology; and it seems but rational to indulge in the same sort of reasonings regarding them. They are the fossils of an extinct order of things newer than the tertiary; of an extinct race, of an extinct religion, of a state of society and a class of enterprises which the world saw once, but which it will never see again; and with but little assistance from the direct testimony of history, one has to grope one's way along this comparatively modern formation, guided chiefly, as in the more ancient deposits, by the clue of circumstantial evidence."[11] Such are the reflections of an intelligent geologist, suggested by a similar combination of geological and historic relics to that which offers itself to the visitor of our great National Museum. But it is even in a more absolute sense than the geologist dreams of that the antiquities piece on to the geology, and show the researches of the archæologist to follow up the closing data of the older systems without a pause. He labours to build up that most important of all the branches of palæontology which pertains to ethnological investigations, and which when brought to maturity will be found not less valuable as an element in the elucidation of the history of nations and of mankind, than the grammatical construction and the affiliations of languages, which the ethnologist now chiefly favours. The archæologist applies to the accumulated facts of his own science the same process of inductive reasoning which the geologist has already employed with such success in investigating still earlier states of being. Both deal with unwritten history, and aim at the recovery of annals long deemed irretrievably erased. Nor is it merely in a parallelism of process, or a continuity of subject, that the affinity is traceable between them. It will be found that they meet on common ground, and dispute the heirship of some of old Time's bequests. The detritus records archæological as well as geological facts. The more recent alluvial strata are the legitimate property of both; while above these lie the evidences of still later changes on the earth's surface--the debris of successive ages, the