CHAPTER VIII.

The bronze age in Europe.

There exist in Europe the evidences of three different ages of human development: 

1.  The Stone Age, which dates back to a vast antiquity.  It is subdivided into two periods:  an age of rough stone implements; and a later age, when these implements were ground smooth and made in improved forms.

2.  The Bronze Age, when the great mass of implements were manufactured of a compound metal, consisting of about nine parts of copper and one part of tin.

3.  An age when iron superseded bronze for weapons and cutting tools, although bronze still remained in use for ornaments.  This age continued down to what we call the Historical Period, and embraces our present civilization; its more ancient remains are mixed with coins of the Gauls, Greeks, and Romans.

The Bronze Period has been one of the perplexing problems of European scientists.  Articles of bronze are found over nearly all that continent, but in especial abundance in Ireland and Scandinavia.  They indicate very considerable refinement and civilization upon the part of the people who made them; and a wide diversity of opinion has prevailed as to who that people were and where they dwelt.

In the first place, it was observed that the age of bronze (a compound of copper and tin) must, in the natural order of things, have been preceded by an age when copper and tin were used separately, before the ancient metallurgists had discovered the art of combining them, and yet in Europe the remains of no such age have been found.  Sir John Lubbock says ("Prehistoric Times,” p. 59), “The absence of implements made either of copper or tin seems to me to indicate that the art of making bronze was introduced into, not invented in, Europe.”  The absence of articles of copper is especially marked, nearly all the European specimens of copper implements have been found in Ireland; and yet out of twelve hundred and eighty-three articles of the Bronze Age, in the great museum at Dublin, only thirty celts and one sword-blade are said to be made of pure copper; and even as to some of these there seems to be a question.

Where on the face of the earth are we to find a Copper Age?  Is it in the barbaric depths of that Asia out of whose uncivilized tribes all civilization is said to have issued?  By no means.  Again we are compelled to turn to the West.  In America, from Bolivia to Lake Superior, we find everywhere the traces of a long-enduring Copper Age; bronze existed, it is true, in Mexico, but it held the same relation to the copper as the copper held to the bronze in Europe—­it was the exception as against the rule.  And among the Chippeways of the shores of Lake Superior, and among them alone, we find any traditions of the origin of the manufacture of copper implements; and on the shores of that lake we find pure copper, out of which the first metal tools were probably hammered before man had learned to reduce the ore or run the metal into moulds.  And on the shores of this same American lake we find the ancient mines from which some people, thousands of years ago, derived their supplies of copper.