they picture the man who wore the scarab?—­can they reconstruct in their minds the scene in the workshop wherein the scarab was made?—­can they hear the song of the workmen or their laughter when the overseer was not nigh?  In a word, does the scarab mean history to them, the history of a period, of a dynasty, of a craft?  Assuredly not, unless the students know Egypt and the Egyptians, have heard their songs and their laughter, have watched their modern arts and crafts.  Only then are they in a position to reconstruct the picture.

Theodore Roosevelt, in his Romanes lecture at Oxford, gave it as his opinion that the industrious collector of facts occupied an honourable but not an exalted position; and he added that the merely scientific historian must rest content with the honour, substantial, but not of the highest type, that belongs to him who gathers material which some time some master shall arise to use.  Now every student should aim to be a master, to use the material which he has so laboriously collected; and though at the beginning of his career, and indeed throughout his life, the gathering of material is a most important part of his work, he should never compile solely for the sake of compilation, unless he be content to serve simply as a clerk of archaeology.

An archaeologist must be an historian.  He must conjure up the past; he must play the Witch of Endor.  His lists and indices, his catalogues and note-books, must be but the spells which he uses to invoke the dead.  The spells have no potency until they are pronounced:  the lists of the kings of Egypt have no more than an accidental value until they call before the curtain of the mind those monarchs themselves.  It is the business of the archaeologist to awake the dreaming dead:  not to send the living to sleep.  It is his business to make the stones tell their tale:  not to petrify the listener.  It is his business to put motion and commotion into the past that the present may see and hear:  not to pin it down, spatchcocked, like a dead thing.  In a word, the archaeologist must be in command of that faculty which is known as the historic imagination, without which Dean Stanley was of opinion that the story of the past could not be told.

But how can that imagination be at once exerted and controlled, as it must needs be, unless the archaeologist is so well acquainted with the conditions of the country about which he writes that his pictures of it can be said to be accurate?  The student must allow himself to be saturated by the very waters of the Nile before he can permit himself to write of Egypt.  He must know the modern Egyptians before he can construct his model of Pharaoh and his court.

In a recent London play dealing with ancient Egypt, the actor-manager exerted his historic imagination, in one scene, in so far as to introduce a shadoof or water-hoist, which was worked as a naturalistic side-action to the main incident.  But, unfortunately, it was displayed upon a hillside where no water could ever have reached it; and thus the audience, all unconsciously, was confronted with the remarkable spectacle of a husbandman applying himself diligently to the task of ladelling thin air on to crops that grew upon barren sand.  If only his imagination had been controlled by a knowledge of Egypt, the picture might have been both true and effective.