pestles and axes may perchance be broken and grow scarce, but the arrow-head shall perhaps never cease to wing its way through the ages to eternity. . . . . When some Vandal chieftain has razed to earth the British Museum, and perchance, the winged bulls of Nineveh shall have lost most, if not all, of their features, the arrowheads which the museum contains, may find themselves at home again in familiar dust, and resume their shining in new springs upon the bared surface of the earth, to be picked up for the thousandth time by the shepherd or savage that may be wandering there, and once more suggest their story to him. . . . . They cannot be said to be lost or found. Surely their use was not so much to bear its fate to some bird or quadruped, or man, as it was to lie here near the surface of the earth for a perpetual reminder to the generations that come after. . . . . As for museums, I think it is better to let nature take care of our antiquities. These are our antiquities, and they are cleaner to think of than the rubbish of the Tower of London, and they are a more ancient armor than is there. It is a recommendation that they are so inobvious that they occur only to the eye and thought that chances to be directed toward them.
When you pick up an arrow-head and put it in your pocket, it may say, "Eh, you think you
