by the public they are most carefully obscured.  In the case of archaeology, however, the tedious details of construction are so placed in the foreground that the final picture is hardly noticed at all.  As well might one go to Rheims to see men fly, and be shown nothing else but screws and nuts, steel rods and cog-wheels.  Originally the fault, perhaps, lay with the archaeologist; now it lies both with him and with the public.  The public has learnt to ask to be shown the works, and the archaeologist is often so proud of them that he forgets to mention the purpose of the machine.

A Roman statue of bronze, let us suppose, is discovered in the Thames valley.  It is so corroded and eaten away that only an expert could recognise that it represents a reclining goddess.  In this condition it is placed in the museum, and a photograph of it is published in ’The Graphic.’  Those who come to look at it in its glass case think it is a bunch of grapes, or possibly a monkey:  those who see its photograph say that it is more probably an irregular catapult-stone or a fish in convulsions.

The archaeologist alone holds its secret, and only he can see it as it was.  He alone can know the mind of the artist who made it, or interpret the full meaning of the conception.  It might have been expected, then, that the public would demand, and the archaeologist delightedly furnish, a model of the figure as near to the original as possible; or, failing that, a restoration in drawing, or even a worded description of its original beauty.  But no:  the public, if it wants anything, wants to see the shapeless object in all its corrosion; and the archaeologist forgets that it is blind to aught else but that corrosion.  One of the main duties of the archaeologist is thus lost sight of:  his duty as Interpreter and Remembrancer of the Past.

All the riches of olden times, all the majesty, all the power, are the inheritance of the present day; and the archaeologist is the recorder of this fortune.  He must deal in dead bones only so far as the keeper of a financial fortune must deal in dry documents.  Behind those documents glitters the gold, and behind those bones shines the wonder of the things that were.  And when an object once beautiful has by age become unsightly, one might suppose that he would wish to show it to none save his colleagues or the reasonably curious layman.  When a man makes the statement that his grandmother, now in her ninety-ninth year, was once a beautiful woman, he does not go and find her to prove his words and bring her tottering into the room:  he shows a picture of her as she was; or, if he cannot find one, he describes what good evidence tells him was her probable appearance.  In allowing his controlled and sober imagination thus to perform its natural functions, though it would never do to tell his grandmother so, he becomes an archaeologist, a remembrancer of the Past.

In the case of archaeology, however, the public does not permit itself so to be convinced.  In the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford excellent facsimile electrotypes of early Greek weapons are exhibited; and these have far more value in bringing the Past before us than the actual weapons of that period, corroded and broken, would have.  But the visitor says, “These are shams,” and passes on.