text:  As the researches of comparative anatomists have enabled us from the examination of a single bone to pronounce with certainty upon the general conformation and habits of the animal to which it belonged; and as in many cases from the existence of such animals we may go on step by step to the nature of the earth's surface at the period when they lived: so the meanest relic of art will serve the natural historian of man as a fulcrum by which he may turn up a mass of genuine information; with which as with all knowledge as its store increases the power of applying it becomes more facile; until at length it scarcely becomes an exaggeration to say that every material relic bears in itself its own natural history and if artificially modified the history of its fabricators--what the germ is to futurity the relic is to the past