Page:Surrey Archaeological Collections Volume 1.djvu/84

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RELIGIOUS BEARING OF ARCHÆOLOGY

those of Minerva, beneath the verge of the Acropolis. And then, if, from the East, we pass homeward to the West, we shall discover that, although with ourselves, even Christian architecture possesses a type and character essentially original and distinct; yet, still, that beneath this, too, are reproduced the features we have recognised elsewhere.

Thus, in the light spire we perceive the obelisk of Egypt; the cave-temples of India, like the pyramids themselves, are reproduced in one gloomy crypt, those catacombs wherein repose in peace the bones of our ancestors, and the ashes of our martyred saints. Sculpture half destroyed, statues mutilated by the hand of man, or yielding to the decay of time, fantastic figures in every form of poetical grotesqueness, inscriptions scarcely legible, or of which the very allusion cannot be traced;—all these present a vague and mysterious analogy to those hieroglyphics of the elder world, of which the eye curiously follows the sharp outlines without the mind being able to comprehend or guess at the hidden meaning. And it is one of the objects which archæology promotes, to follow up these researches, to trace these resemblances, to deduce these analogies, and thereby to reconstruct, from the minutest and most unpromising fragments, faithful records of all that is grandest and loveliest and noblest in art. For it is with archæology as with its kindred science geology; the triumphs of each are acquired by means of the analytic element carried to the highest point. And in alluding to geology, I speak also of that science which is not indeed the same, but yet which is seldom separated from it in study. I mean the study in which Cuvier attained such mastery and skill—the study of the remains of extinct races of animals, and the reconstruction of their scat-