century, if as early as that.  How then was it possible that, if iron had been known to the Egyptians as early as 3500 B.C., its knowledge should not have been communicated to the Europeans until over two thousand years later?  No; iron could not have been really known to the Egyptians much before 1000 B.C. and the Egyptological evidence was all wrong.  This line of argument was taken by the distinguished Swedish archaeologist, Prof.  Oscar Montelius, of Upsala, whose previous experience in dealing with the antiquities of Northern Europe, great as it was, was hardly sufficient to enable him to pronounce with authority on a point affecting far-away African Egypt.  And when dealing with Greek prehistoric antiquities Prof.  Montelius’s views have hardly met with that ready agreement which all acknowledge to be his due when he is giving us the results of his ripe knowledge of Northern antiquities.  He has, in fact, forgotten, as most “prehistoric” archaeologists do forget, that the antiquities of Scandinavia, Greece, Egypt, the Semites, the bronze-workers of Benin, the miners of Zimbabwe, and the Ohio mound-builders are not to be treated all together as a whole, and that hard and fast lines of development cannot be laid down for them, based on the experience of Scandinavia.

We may perhaps trace this misleading habit of thought to the influence of the professors of natural science over the students of Stone Age and Bronze Age antiquities.  Because nature moves by steady progression and develops on even lines—­nihil facit per sal-tum—­it seems to have been assumed that the works of man’s hands have developed in the same way, in a regular and even scheme all over the world.  On this supposition it would be impossible for the great discovery of the use of iron to have been known in Egypt as early as 3500 B.C. for this knowledge to have remained dormant there for two thousand years, and then to have been suddenly communicated about 1000 B.C. to Greece, spreading with lightning-like rapidity over Europe and displacing the use of bronze everywhere.  Yet, as a matter of fact, the work of man does develop in exactly this haphazard way, by fits and starts and sudden leaps of progress after millennia of stagnation.  Throwsback to barbarism are just as frequent.  The analogy of natural evolution is completely inapplicable and misleading.

Prof.  Montelius, however, following the “evolutionary” line of thought, believed that because iron was not known in Europe till about 1000 B.C. it could not have been known in Egypt much earlier; and in an important article which appeared in the Swedish ethnological journal Ymer in 1883, entitled Bronsaldrn i Egypten ("The Bronze Age in Egypt"), he essayed to prove the contrary arguments of the Egyptologists wrong.  His main points were that the colour of the weapons in the frescoes was of no importance, as it was purely conventional and arbitrary, and that the evidence of the piece of iron from the Great Pyramid