It often happens that an old art or custom, which has been superseded for general purposes by some more convenient arrangement, is kept up long afterwards in solemn ceremonies and other matters under the control of priests and officials, who are commonly averse to change; as inventions have often to wait long after they have come into general use before they are officially recognized. Wooden tallies were given for receipts by our Exchequer up to the time of William IV., as if to keep up, as long as might be, the remembrance of the time when "our forefathers had no other books but the score and the tally." It is true that the notched Exchequer tally had long had a Latin inscription on it, and at last there was given into the bargain a fair English receipt, written on a separate paper. The tally survives still, not only in the broken sixpence, and in, the bargains of peasants in outlying districts,[1] but in the counterfoil of the banker's cheque. Some evidence of this ceremonial keeping up of arts superseded in private life, will be given in the chapters on the Stone Age and Fire-making.
Such helps as these in working out the problem of the Origin and Progress of Culture grow scarcer as we descend among the lower races, and those of which we have little or no historical knowledge. Mere observation of arts in use, and of objects belonging to tribes living or dead, forms at present the bulk of the evidence of the history of their culture accessible to us. Of these records an immense mass has been collected, but they are very hard to read.
Sometimes, indeed, an object carries its history written in its form, as some of the Esquimaux knives brought to England, which are carved out of a single piece of bone, in imitation of European knives with handles, and show that the maker was acquainted with those higher instruments, though he had not the iron to make a blade of, or even a few scraps to fix along the edge of the bone blade, as they so often do.
The keeping up in stone architecture of designs belonging to wooden buildings, furnishes conclusive proofs of the growth, in several countries, of the art of building in stone from the art of building in wood, an argument which is used with extra-
- ↑ Pictet, 'Origines,' part ii. p. 425.
