nt 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 s