the remote sea-scattered northern regions on the Baltic, had not vast virgin tracts of mountain-lands in eastern and central Europe lain like a frontier-rampart to the south, and thus for centuries checked the Bronze-Age and people in their steady advance from Asia and the Mediterranean and Black Sea coasts to the Danube

lands and the interior of Europe. The Bronze-Age can hardly have reached the old Danish lands earlier than about 1000 B.C., at which time the knowledge of iron had already begun to spread in the far more favourably situated southern and south-western parts of Europe.

Second Part.

THE BRONZE-AGE.

CHAPTER IV.

THE RISE AND SPREAD OF THE BRONZE-AGE.

PREVIOUS to the certain records of history, the age of which varies greatly in various lands and quarters of the globe, no period of man's progress was so widespread so uniform and so lasting as the Age of Stone. Aided only by the simple and accessible materials, stone bone and wood, the human race was able-but very slowly and only after the lapse of thousands of yearsto overspread almost the whole earth. Even to this day the last of the Stone-Age peoples have not quite vanished in very distant regions.

In the main types of implements and weapons in spite of all local differences a very striking agreement prevails even in quarters furthest from one another. This can scarcely be due to a natural instinct of man for inventing in the same universal forms the most necessary and handiest articles for his daily needs. Possibly in this he has preserved some dim memory of

a common original home, from which the human race in its earliest childhood was scattered over the earth.

Very different must have been the state of things. during the succeeding period. With the knowledge and use of metals the development of a considerably higher culture became possible under favourable circumstances. Races however did not by any means universally and at once adapt themselves to such a culture, or in equal measure adopt it with the metal. But, not to dwell on this, the metals were rare and therefore costly, while trade communications between land and land were also difficult and tedious. This in itself was reason enough why neither the Bronze-Age nor in later times the pre-historic Age of Iron could gain such sway and spread as widely as the previous far more lasting Age of Stone.

We cannot speak of a real metal-period as already having begun in those places where metals occur in so easily recognisable and accessible a condition, that they have been used contemporaneously with stone and bronze for tools and weapons. Thus Eskimo races in the extreme north of America insert edgings of the so-called meteoric iron in pieces of bone; but notwithstanding they have not yet risen above the lowest level of the Stone-Age. Farther south-on the great lakes of North America-copper lies on or quite near the earth's surface, so pure that it can easily be hammered out with a stone. And so the Indians in their day over a great part of America have used objects of copper along with the ordinary objects of stone, though only, it would seem, during a later stage of the StoneAge. In the older shell-heaps or "kitchen-middens"

D

on the American coasts not a vestige of copper or of any other metal has yet been brought to light. There is not a single trustworthy find to prove that man anywhere on earth in his first primeval condition at once came to the knowledge and use of metals, e.g. copper or iron, before or even at the same time as stone bone and wood. Quite exceptionally we may in some few places expect to meet with metal objects in deeper or older strata than stone objects. There can be no doubt that here and there civilisation has oscillated and even gone back altogether, when ruder races have succeeded in overpowering and destroying a more highly civilised people. A suggestive instance of this occurred in Greenland quite late in historical times. There the last remains of the Scandinavian colonists, who had long used iron, were overwhelmed and annihilated by the stone-using Eskimos.1

In any case it is clear that a great advance in the development of man had begun before the rise of the Bronze-Age, with its implements weapons and ornaments of a compound cast-metal, and ornaments also of gold. It had taken long for man to learn how to employ fire in his service; and it must naturally have

1 Greenland was first discovered at the beginning of the tenth century by Gunbjörn from Iceland, colonised in 985 by Erik Thorvaldsön, and annexed in 1261 by Haakon Haakonsön. The Western Colony was abandoned in 1342. The Eastern Colony was harried by the Skrällings ("Puny Folk") in 1379, desolated by the Black Death early in the fourteenth century, and annihilated by the natives shortly after. The present colony dates from the settlement of Hans Egede in 1721. In the Ethnographical Museum, Copenhagen, by the courtesy of the curator Justitsraad Stenhauer the translator was enabled to inspect Eskimo stone and bone implements, evidently formed on the model of European metal objects.

been still longer ere he came to know that metals might be smelted out of ores, and particularly that copper fused with tin produces a peculiar metalbronze-far better adapted than pure copper for casting and making edged tools and weapons. It is not impossible that in the search for ores he may occasionally have stumbled on iron ore at an early date. Iron however is not found in so pure a state naturally as copper, and is also more difficult to smelt. Copper therefore both pure and alloyed must in general have been used before iron; and this inference is distinctly confirmed by archæological observations.

The knowledge of copper and manner of hammering it out may easily have arisen coincidently in very different places, where copper was plentiful, without any intercourse between the peoples. Bronze on the other hand is an artificial metal composed by smelting about nine parts of copper with one of tin. It must therefore originally have been discovered in a land where both copper and tin were native; and from this country the new and more serviceable compound metal would gradually win recognition and wider circulation.

Nowhere in Europe, the copper and tin mines of which appear in general to have been worked only at a comparatively late period, can we point either to a primitive Copper-Age with articles of copper simply wrought, or to an original Bronze-Age, developed by the native inhabitants themselves, with casts of copper or bronze. Here again the facts point more and more towards the ancient culture-lands in Asia,—and to India in particular with its rich veins of copper and tin,—as in many respects the most probable starting