[just one of those things which sort of makes me despair of ever really
making any sense out of archaeological data; I mean: what would anyone say
if they had found these 3 objects while excavating; they'd probably all be
thrown away, unrecorded...]

Lecturing at the London Institution in 1876, Ruskin held out both his hands
to his audience. On his right palm lay “a little round thing” and on his
left “a little flat one.” The first was a pebble and the second a sovereign.
The latter launched him into the themes of empire, value and the economy.
The former, the black pebble, led him to recall a meeting with the great
geologist James Forbes – a man seemingly made of mountain flint in his
inaccessibility and taciturnity. To these two objects, Ruskin added a
further black pebble, one that “used to decorate the chimney-piece of the
children’s play-room” in his aunt’s house in Perth when he was seven “just
half a century ago.” With this third pebble, Ruskin exposed the bond between
two types of time: the human span of time evoked by the image of his self at
age fifty-seven and his self at age seven, and the mineralogical span of
time that forms the life of the pebble. The span of time invoked by the
memory of his own childhood was, of course, a mere flicker by comparison
with the mineralogical time of his pebbles. But childhood – his own and that
of others – was more than a rough and emotive yardstick in Ruskin’s
discourse; it was a framework for the emotional management of time (Pointon
1999: 199-200)


REFERENCES CITED

Pointon, M.
1999 "These Fragments I have Shored against my Ruins". In The Story of Time,
edited by Lippincott, K., pp. 198-201.  Merrell Holberton, London.