The opinions elaborated by the whole of mankind 'with all their fluctuations and contradictions,' seem to me to carry a certain weight, and, at all events, to convey more instruction than the system of any or even of all of our living philosophers.

Nor is it necessary that an historical study should exclude contemporary history. The philosophers of to-day will to-morrow be philosophers of yesterday, and if they have added anything original to the inherited stock of human knowledge, they will take their proper place in the historical Council of the world.

Whatever questions I have had to deal with, I have always found their historical treatment and solution the most satisfactory. If we do not understand a thing, if we hardly know what it is, what it means, and how to call it, it is always open to us to try to find out how it has come to be what it is. It is wonderful how this method clears our thoughts, and how it helps us to disentangle the most hopeless tangles which those who came before us have left to us as our inheritance. This historical method has regenerated the study of language, it has infused a new spirit into the study of ancient law; why should it not render the same kind of help to an independent study of religion?

Archaeology.

Nowhere, perhaps, can we see more clearly the different spirit in which these two schools, the historical and the theoretical, set to work than in what is called by preference the Science of Man, Anthropology; or the Science of People, Ethnology; or

more generally the science of old things, of the works of ancient men, Archaeology.

Theoretic School.

The Theoretic School begins, as usual, with an ideal conception of what man must have been in the beginning. According to some, he was the image of his Maker, a perfect being, but soon destined to fall to the level of ordinary humanity. According to others, he began as a savage, whatever that may mean, not much above the level of the beasts of the field, and then had to work his way up through successive stages, which are supposed to follow each other by a kind of inherent necessity. First comes the stage of the hunter and fisherman, then that of the breeder of cattle, the tiller of the soil, and lastly that of the founder of cities.

But while one school of anthropologists would thus derive civilisation by a gradual evolution from the lowest savagery, another school considers the savage as a stationary and quiescent being, so much so that it bids us recognise in the savage of to-day the unchanged representative of the primordial savage, and encourages us to study the original features of man in such survivals as the Bushmen, the Papuans and the Cherokees. These two views might seem contradictory, unless we distinguish between stationary savages and progressive savages, or define at least the meaning of the word, before we allow it to enter into our scientific currency.

Again, as man is defined as an animal which uses tools, we are told that, according to the various materials of which these tools were made, man must

by necessity have passed through what are called the three stages or ages of stone, bronze, and iron, raising himself by means of his more and more perfect tools to what we might call the age of steel and steam and electricity, in which for the present civilisation seems to culminate. Whatever discoveries are made by excavating the ruins of ancient cities, by opening tombs, by ransacking kitchen-middens, by exploring once more the flint-mines of prehistoric races, all must submit to the fundamental theory, and each specimen of bone or stone or bronze or iron must take the place drawn out for it within the lines and limits of an infallible system.

Historical School.

The Historical School takes the very opposite line. It begins with no theoretical expectations, with no logical necessities, but takes its spade and shovel to see what there is left of old things. It describes them, arranges them, classifies them, and thus hopes in the end to understand and to explain them. Thus when Schliemann began his work at Hissarlik, he dug away, noted the depth at which each relic was found, placed similar relics side by side, unconcerned whether iron comes before bronze, or bronze before flint. Here are the facts, he seems to say to the students of archaeology now arrange them and draw your own conclusions from them.

Let me quote the words of a young and very careful archaeologist, Mr. Arthur Evans, in describing this kind of work, and the results which we obtain from it 1:

In the topmost stratum of Hissarlik,' he writes, 1 Academy, December 29, 1883.

'(which some people like to call Troy,) extending six feet down, we find remains of the Roman and Macedonian Ilios, and the Aeolic colony; and the fragments of archaic Greek pottery discovered (hardly distinguishable from that of Spata and Mykenai) take us back already to the end of the first millennium before our era.

'Below this, one superposed above the other, lie the remains of no less than six successive prehistoric settlements, reaching down to over fifty feet below the surface of the hill. The formation of this vast superincumbent mass by artificial and natural causes must have taken a long series of centuries; and yet, when we come to examine the lowest deposits, the remains of the first and second cities, we are struck at once with the relatively high state of civilisation at which the inhabitants of this spot had already arrived.

'The food-remains show a people acquainted with agriculture and cattle-rearing, as well as with hunting and fishing. The use of bronze was known, though stone-implements continued to be used for certain purposes, and the bronze implements do not show any of the refined forms—notably the fibulae— characteristic of the later Bronze Age.

Trade and commerce evidently were not wanting. Articles de luxe of gold, enamel, and ivory were already being imported from lands more directly under Babylonian and Egyptian influence, and jadeaxeheads came by prehistoric trade routes from the Kuen-Lun, in China. The local potters were already acquainted with the use of the wheel, and the citywalls and temples of the Second City evince considerable progress in the art of building.'

Such is the method of the Historical School, and such the results which it obtains. It runs its shaft down from above; the Theoretical School runs its shaft up from below. It may be that they are both doing good work, but such is the strength of temperament and taste, even among scientific men, that you will rarely see the same person working in both mines; nay, that not seldom you hear the same disparaging remarks made by one party of the other, which you may be accustomed to hear from the promoters of rival gold mines in India or in the South of Africa.

Study of Language (Historical School).

Let us now cast a glance at the work which these two schools, the historical and the theoretical, have done in the study of language. The Historical School in trying to solve the problem of the origin and growth of language, takes language as it finds it. It takes the living languages in their various dialects, and traces each word back from century to century, until from the English, for instance, now spoken in the streets, we arrive at the Saxon of Alfred, the Old Saxon of the Continent, and the Gothic of Ulfilas, as spoken on the Danube in the fourth century. Even here we do not stop. For finding that Gothic is but a dialect of the great Teutonic stem of language, that Teutonic again is but a dialect of the great Aryan family of speech, we trace Teutonic and its collateral branches, Greek, Latin, Celtic, Slavonic, Persian, and Sanskrit, back to that Proto-Aryan form of speech which contained the seeds of all we now see before us developed