in this way, history makes the past present. The
innovating archaeologist, by an apparently paradoxical inspiration, has
asked of death the secret of life; he has studied the tomb, which has
yielded up to him not only the mysteries of destruction, but the customs
and the national life of all the nations of antiquity. The sepulchre has
faithfully preserved what the memory of man has forgotten and what has
been lost in scattered libraries. The tomb alone, opening its sombre
lips, has replied to the questions of to-day; it knows what historians
do not know; it is impartial, and has no interest in lying, apart from
the innocent imposture of the epitaph. Each generation, as it sinks
forever under the ground, after having lived and moved for a few moments
on its surface, inscribes upon the walls of its funeral dwelling the
true expression of its acts, its beliefs, its customs, its arts, its
luxuries, its individuality, all that was seen then and that shall never
again be seen, and then the hand of man rolls boulders, the desert heaps
up sand, the waters of the stream deposit mud upon the forgotten
entrance to the necropolis. The pits are filled up, the subterranean
passages are effaced, the tombs sink and disappear under the dust of
empires. A thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four thousand years
pass by, and a lucky stroke of the pick reveals a whole nation within a
coffin.

The ancients, differing in this respect from the moderns, spent their
life in preparing their last dwelling. The history of their funerals
contains, therefore, the germ of their whole history. But that history,
full of intimate details, mysterious facts, and documents at times
enigmatical, is not to be written like the other form of history which
men are satisfied to repeat from age to age. It is amazing how many
years the author had to spend in study and research in order to write
his book, to bring together his materials, to analyse and to compare
them.

After having clearly defined what he means by archaeology, the author
enters upon his subject. Going back to the beginnings of the world, he
depicts the amazement and the grief of man when for the first time he
saw his fellow-man die. The entrance on earth of that unknown and
terrible power which has since been called death is solemn and tragical.
The body is lying there motionless and cold amid its brethren, who are
amazed at the sleep which they cannot break, at the livid pallor and the
stif