The Second Stone Age

( Originally Published Early 1900's )

BETWEEN the earlier and the later stone age, between man of the drift period and man of the neolithic era, occurs a vast blank which we cannot fill in. We bid adieu to the primitive inhabitants of our earth while they are still the contemporaries of the mammoth and woolly rhinoceros, or of the cave lion and the cave bear, and while the very surface of the earth wears a different aspect from what it now wears. With a changed condition of things, with a race of animals which differed not essentially from those known to us, and with a settled conformation of our lands and seas not again to be departed from, comes before us the second race of man —man of the polished-stone age,. We cannot account for the sudden break; or, what is in truth the same thing, many different suggestions to account for it have been made. Some have supposed that the Palaeolithic men lived at a time anterior to the last glacial era, for there were many glacial

periods in Europe, and were either exterminated altogether or driven thence to more southern countries by the change in climate. Others have imagined that a new and more cultivated race migrated into these countries, and at once introduced the improved weapons of the later stone age; and lastly, others have looked upon the first stone age as having existed before the deluge, and hold that the second race of man, the descendants of Noah, began at once with a higher sort of civilization. Two of these four theories, it will be seen, must suppose that man somewhere went through the stages of improvement necessary to the introduction of the newer sort of weapons, and they therefore take it for granted that the graduated series of stone implements, indicating a gradual progress from the old time to the newer, though they have not yet been found, are to be discovered somewhere. The first and last theories would seem to be more independent of this supposition, and therefore, as far as our knowledge yet goes, to be more in accordance with the facts which we possess. It is, however, by no means safe to affirm that the graduated series of implements required to support the other suppositions will never be found.

Be this as it may, with the second era begins the real continuous history of our race. However scanty the marks of his tracks, we may feel sure that from this time forward man passed on one unbroken journey of development and change through the forgotten eras of the world's life down to the dawn of history. And taking his rudest condition to be the most primitive, he first appears before us a fisher depending for his chief nourishment upon the shell-fish of the coast. In the north of Europe, that is to say, upon the shores of the Baltic, are found numbers of mounds, some five or ten feet high, and in length as much, sometimes, as a thousand feet, by one or two hundred in breadth. The mounds consist for the most past of myriads of cast-away shells of oysters, mussels, cockles, and other shell-fish; mixed up with these are many bones of birds and quadrupeds, showing that these also served for food to the primitive dwellers by the shell 'hounds. They are called in the present day kjökken-möddings, kitchen-middens. They are, in truth, the refuse heaps of the earliest kitchens which have smoked in these northern regions; for they are the remains of some of the earliest among the polished-stone age inhabitants of Europe.

The raisers of the Danish kitchen-middens were, we may judge, preeminently fishers; and not fishers of that adventurous kind who seek their treasure in the depths of the ocean. They lived chiefly upon those smaller fish and shell-fish which could be caught without much difficulty or danger. But yet not only on these; for the bones of some deep-sea fish have also been discovered, whence we know that the mound-raisers were possessed of one very important discovery, in the germ at least the art of navigation. Among remains believed to be contemporary with the shell-mounds are found rude canoes not built of planks like boats, but merely hollowed out of the trunks of trees; sometimes they are quite straight fore and aft, just as the trunk was when it was cut, sometimes a little bevelled from below, like the stern of a boat of the present day; but we believe they are never found rounded or pointed at the prow. That " heart with oak and bronze thrice bound," the man who first ventured to sea in the first vessel, had therefore lived before this time. Whoever he was, we cannot, if we think of it, refuse to endorse the praise be-stowed upon him by the poet; it required immense courage to venture out to sea on such a strange make-shift as the first canoe must have been. Perhaps the earliest experiment was an involuntary one, made by some one who was washed away upon a large log or felled tree. Then arose the notion of venturing again a little way, then of hollowing a seat in the middle of the trunk, until the primitive canoes, such as we find, came into existence.

In these imperfect vessels men gradually ventured further and further into the ocean; and, judging of the extent of their voyages by the deep-sea remains, we may be certain that their bravery was fatal to many. This is in all probability the history of the discovery or re-discovery of the art of navigation among savage people generally; in all cases does the canoe precede the regular boat, and though Noah would seem to have possessed the art of shipbuilding in much greater perfection, his art would most probably have died with him if, as was probably the case, his descendants were long settled far inland. For it is a fact that people rarely begin attempts at shipbuilding before they come to live near the sea. As long as they can range freely on land, their rivers do not tempt them to any dangerous experiments. But the vast plain of the sea is too important, and makes too great an impression on their imagination for its charm to be long withstood. Sooner or later, with much risk of life, men are sure to try and explore its solitudes, and navigation takes its rise. This art of seafaring, then, is amongst the most noticeable of the belongings of the fishermen of the shell-mounds. Considering that they had none but rude stone implements, the felling and hollowing of the trees must have been an affair of no small labor, and very likely occupied a great deal of their time when they were not actually seeking their food, even though the agency of fire supplemented the ineffectual blow of the stone weapons. They must have used nets for their sea-fishing, made probably of twisted bark or grass. And they were hunters as well as fishers, for the remains of various animals have been discovered on the shell mounds. From these we see that the age of the post-glacial animals had by this time quite passed away; no mammoth, woolly rhinoceros; or cave lion or bear is found: even the rein-deer, which in palaeolithic days must have ranged over France and Switzerland, has disappeared.

The fact is, the climate is now much more temperate and uniform than in the first stone age. Then the reindeer and the chamois, animals which belong naturally to regions of ice and snow, freely traversed, in winter at least, the valleys or the plains far towards the south of Europe.' But as the climate changed,. the first was driven to the extreme north of Europe, and the second to the higher mountain peaks. The only extinct species belonging to the shell-mounds is the wild bull (bos primiyenius), which however survived in Europe until quite historical times. He appears in great numbers, as does the seal, now very rare, and the beaver, which is extinct in Denmark. No remains of any domesticated animal are found, but the existence of tame dogs is-guessed at from the fact that the bones bear traces of the gnawing of canine teeth, and from the absence of bones of young birds and of the softer bones of animals generally. For it has been shown experimentally that just those portions are absent from these skeletons which will be devoured when birds or animals of the same species are given to dogs at this day. Dogs, therefore, were domesticated by the stone-age men; so here again we can see the beginning of a step in civilization which has been of incalculable benefit to man, the taming of animals for his use. The ox, the sheep, the goat, were as yet unknown; man was still in the hunter's condition, and had not advanced to the shepherd state, only training for his use the dog, to assist him in pursuit of the wild animals who supplied part of his food. He was, too, utterly devoid of all agricultural knowledge. It is an established fact that men become hunters before they become shepherds, and shepherds before they advance to the state of tillers of the soil. Probably the domestication of the dog marks a sort of transition state between the hunter and the shepherd. When that experiment has been tried the notion must sooner or later spring up of training other animals, and keeping them for use or food. With regard to the dogs themselves, it is a curious fact that those of the stone age are smaller than those of the bronze period, while the dogs of the bronze age are again smaller than those of the age of iron. This is an illustration of the well-known fact that domestication increases the size and improves the character of animals as training does that of plants.

There is one other negative fact which we gather from the bones of these refuse-heaps no human bones are mingled with them, so that we may conclude these men were not cannibals. In fact, cannibalism is an extraordinary perversion of human nature, arising it is difficult to say exactly how, and only showing itself among particular people and under peculiar conditions. There is no doubt that, among a very large proportion of the savage nations which at present inhabit our globe, cannibalism is practised, and of this fact many explanations have been offered; but they are generally far-fetched and unsatisfactory; and it is certainly not within our scope to discuss them here. How little natural cannibalism is even to the most savage men is proved by the fact that man is scarcely ever, except under urgent necessity, found to feed upon the flesh of carnivorous or flesh-eating animals, and this alone, besides every instinct of our nature, would be sufficient to prevent him from eating his fellow-men.

We have many proofs of the great antiquity of the shell-. mounds. Their position gives one. - While most of them are confined to the immediate neighborhood of the sea-shore, some few are found at a distance of several miles inland. These exceptions may always be referred to the presence of a stream which has gradually deposited its mud at the place where it emptied itself into the sea, or to some other cause fitted for the extension of the coast line ; so that these miles of new coast have come into existence after the shell-mounds were raised. On the other hand, there are no mounds upon those parts of the coast which border on the Western Ocean. But it is just here that, owing to a gradual depression of the land at the rate of two or three inches in a century ' the waves are gradually eating away the shore. This is what happens on every sea-coast. Almost all over the world there is a small but constant movement of the solid crust of the earth, which is, in fact, only a crust over the molten mass within. Sometimes, and in some places, the imprisoned mass makes itself felt, in violent upheavals, in sudden cracks of the inclosing surface, which we call earthquakes and volcanoes; but oftener its effect is slight and almost unnoticed. This interchange of state between the kingdoms of the land and of the ocean helps to show us the time which has passed between the making of the kitchen-middens and our own days. There seems little doubt that all along the coast of the North Sea, as well as on that of the Baltic, these mounds once stood; but by the gradual undermining of the cliffs the former have all been swept away, while the latter have, as it appears, been moved a little inland; and we have seen that when there was another cause present to form land between the kitchen-middens and the sea, the distance has often been increased to several miles.

There is another and still stronger proof of the antiquity of the shell-mounds. If we examine the shells themselves, we find that they all belong to still living species, and they are all exactly similar to such as might be found in the ocean at the present day. But it happens that this is not now the case with the shells of the same fish belonging to the Baltic Sea. For the waters of this sea are brackish, and not salt; so that the shell-fish which dwell in it do not attain half their natural size. The oyster, too, will not live at all in the Baltic, except near its entrance, where, whenever the wind blows from the north-west, a strong current of salt ocean water is poured in. Yet the oyster-shells are especially abundant in the kitchen-middens. From all this we gather that, at the time of the making of these mounds, there must have been free communication between the ocean and the Baltic Sea. In all probability, in fact, there were a number of such passages through the peninsula of Jutland, which was consequently at that time an archipelago.

As ages passed on the descendants of these solitary fishermen spread themselves over Europe, and improving in their way of life and mastery over mechanical arts, found them-selves no longer constrained to trust for their livelihood to the spoils of the sea-shallows. They made lances and axes (headed with stone), and perfected the use of the bow and arrow until they became masters of the game of the forest. And then, after a while, man grew out of this hunter stage and domesticated other animals besides the dog: oxen, pigs, and geese. No longer occupied solely by the search for his daily food he raised mighty tombs huge mounds of earth inclosing a narrow grave to the departed great men of his race; and he reared up those enormous masses of stone called cromlechs or dolmens suçh as we see at Stonehenge as altars to his gods.

The great tombs of earth which have their fellows not in Europe only, but over the greater part of the world are the special and characteristic features of the stone age. The raisers of the kitchen-middens may have preceded the men who built the tombs; for their mode of life was as we should say the most primitive: but they were confined to a corner of Europe. The tomb-builders formed one of a mighty brotherhood of men linked together by the characteristics of a common civilization. These sepulchres called in England tumuli or barrows are hills of earth from one to as much as four hundred feet long, by a breadth and height of from thirty to fifty feet. They are either chambered or unchambered; that is, they are either raised over a small vault made of stone (with perhaps a sort of vestibule or - entrance chamber), or else a mere hollow has been excavated within the mound. In these recesses repose the bodies of the dead, some great chieftain or hero the father of his people, who came to be regarded after his death with almost the veneration of a god. Beside the dead were placed various implements and utensils, left there to do him honor or service, to assist him upon the journey to that undiscovered country whither he was bound; the best of sharpened knives or spear-heads, some jars of their rude pottery, once filled with food and drink, porridge, rough cakes and beer.' And may be a wife or two, and some captives of the last battle were sacrificed to his shade, that he might not go quite unattended into that " other world." The last ceremony was not always, but it must have been often, enacted. Out of thirty-two stone age barrows excavated in 'Wiltshire, seventeen contained only one skeleton, and the rest various numbers, from two to an indefinite number; and, in one case at least, all the skulls save one have been found cleft as by a stone hatchet.

At the door of the mound or in an entrance chamber many bones have been discovered, the traces of a funeral feast, the .wake or watch kept on the evening of the burial. Likely enough if the chief were almost deified after death, the funeral feast would become periodical. It would be considered canny and of good omen that the elders of the tribe should meet there at times in solemn conclave, on the eve of a warlike expedition or whenever the watchful care of the dead hero might avail his descendants. From the remains of these feasts, and from the relics of the tombs, we have the means of forming some idea of man's acquirements at this time. His implements are improvements upon those of the stone age; in all respects, that is, save in this one, that he had now no barbed weapons; whereas we remember that in the caves barbed harpoons are frequently met with. Nor, again, had he the artistic talent of the cave-dwellers: no traces of New Stone-age drawings have come to light. For the rest, his implements and weapons may be divided into a few distinctive classes:-

1. Hammers, hatchets, tomahawks, or chisels, an instrument made of a heavy piece of stone brought to a sharp cutting edge at one end, and at the other rounded or flat, so as to serve the double purpose of a hammer and an axe. When these are of an elongated form they are called celts or chisels. 2. Arrow and spear-heads, which differ in size but not much in form, both being long and narrow in shape, often closely resembling the leaf of the laurel or the bay, sometimes of a diamond shape, but more often having the lateral corners nearest to the end which fitted into the shaft. Viewed edgeways, they also appear to taper towards either end, for while one point was designed to pierce the victim, the other was fitted into a cleft handle, and bound into it with cord or sinew. Implements have been discovered still fitted into their handles. 3. The stone knives, which have generally two cutting edges, and when this is the case do not greatly differ from the spear-heads, though they are commonly less pointed than the latter. A few bone implements have been found in the tumuli, a pin, a chisel, and a knife or so; but they are very rare, they are never carved, and have not one-quarter of the interest which belongs to the bone implements of the caves. Finally, we must not omit to say that in Anhalt, in Germany, a large stone has been found which seems to have served the purpose of a plough. For there can be little doubt that if some of the tumuli belong to a time before the use of domesticated animals save the dog they last down to a time when man not only had tame oxen, pigs, goats, and geese,' but also sowed and planted, and lived the life of an agricultural race; nor will it be said that such an advance was extraordinary when we say that the minimum duration of the age of polished stone was probably two thousand years.

Other relics from the mounds, not less interesting than the weapons, are their vessels of pottery; for here we see the earliest traces of another art. This pottery is of a black color, curiously mixed with powdered shells, perhaps to strengthen the clay, perhaps for ornament. Its pottery belongs to the latter portion of this age of stone, a period distinguished not only by the use of domestic animals, but also by the growth of cereals.. We have said that bones of cattle, swine, and in one case of a goose, have been found among the refuse of the funeral feasts. But man was still a hunter, as he is to this day, though he had found other means of support besides the wild game; and we also find the bones of the red-deer and the wild bull, both of which supplied him with food. Wolves' teeth too have been found pierced, so as to be strung into a necklace; for personal adornment formed, in those days as now, part of the interest of life. Jet beads have been discovered in large numbers, and even some of amber, which seems to have been brought from the Baltic to these countries and as far south as Switzerland; and it is known that during the last portion of what is, nevertheless, still the stone period, the most precious metal of all, gold, was used for ornament. Gold is the one metal which is frequently found on the surface of the ground, and therefore it was naturally the first to come under the eye of man.

Their religion probably consisted in part of the worship of the dead, so that the very tombs themselves, and not the cromlechs only, were a sort of temples. And yet they had the deepest dread of the reappearance of the departed upon earth of his ghost. To prevent his " walking " they adopted a strange practical form of exorcism. They strewed the ground at the grave's mouth with sharp stones or broken 'pieces of pottery, as though a ghost could have his feet cut, and by fear of that be kept from returning to his old haunts. For ages and ages after the days of the mound-builders the same custom lived on of which we here see the rise. The same ceremony turned now to an unmeaning rite was used for the graves of those, such as murderers or suicides, who might be expected to sleep uneasily in their narrow house. This is the custom which is referred to in the speech of the priest to Laertes.1 Ophelia had died under such suspicion of suicide, that it was a stretch of their rule, he says, to grant her Christian burial.

" And but the great command o'ersways our order,
She should in ground unsanctified have lodged
To the last trumpet : for charitable prayers,
Shards, flints and pebbles, should be thrown on her."

The body of him for whom the mound was built was not buried in the centre, but at one end, and that commonly the east, for in most cases the barrows lie east and west. It is never stretched out flat, but lies or sits in a crouched attitude, the head brought down upon the breast, and the knees raised up to meet the chin. So that the dead man was left facing towards the west the going down of the sun. There cannot but be some significance in this. The daily death of the sun has, in all ages and to all people, spoken of man's own death, his western course has seemed to tell of that last journey upon which all are bent. So that the resting place of the soul is nearly always imagined to lie westward in the home of the setting sun. For the rest; there seems little doubt that the barrows represent nothing else though upon a large scale than the dwelling home of the time, and that the greater part of their funeral rites are very literal and unsymbolical.1 The Esquimaux and Lapps of our day dwell in huts no more commodious than the small chambers of the barrows, and exceedingly like them in shape; only they keep them warm by heaping up over them not earth but snow. In these they sit squatting in an attitude, not unlike that of the skeleton of the tumuli. Of the human remains the skulls are small and round, and have a prominent ridge over the sockets of the eyes, showing that the ancient race was of small stature with round heads and overhanging eyebrows; in short, they bore a considerable resemblance to the modern Laplanders.

We are still, however, left in darkness about that part of the stone age thought which has left the grandest traces, and of which we should so much have wished to be informed; I mean the religion. Besides the tumuli we have those enormous piles of stone called cromlechs, or dolmens, and sometimes miscalled Druid Circles such is the well-known Stonehenge; these were their temples or sacred places. Each arrangement is generally a simple archway, made by placing one enormous block upon two others; and these arches are sometimes arranged in circles, as at Stonehenge, sometimes in long colonnades, as at Carnac in Brittany. Lesser dolmens have been found in most European countries; and there can be little doubt that they possessed a religious character. As a rule, the grave-mounds are built upon elevations commanding a considerable prospect, and it is rare to find two within sight. Yet over Salisbury Plain, and the part about Stonehenge, they are much more numerous, as many as a hundred and fifty having been discovered in this neighbor-hood, as though it were a desired privilege to be buried within such hallowed ground. Of the worship which these stone altars commemorate we know absolutely nothing. There seems to be no reasonable doubt that they belong to the period we are describing. The name Druid Circles, which has been sometimes given them, is an absurd anachronism, for, as we shall have occasion to see later on, the ancestors of the Kelts (or Celts), to whom the Druidical religion belonged, were at this time still living on the banks of the Oxus in Central Asia. Thus, though we must continue to wonder how these people could ever have raised such enormous stones as altars of their religion, the nature of that religion itself is hidden from us.

The relics of the tombs are the truest representatives of the stone age, for these tombs show their summits in every land, and the characteristic features of the remains found in them are the saine in each. They have arisen during the greatest extension of the stone age races, before any other people had come to dispute their territory, and express their fullest development, as the shell-mounds do their germ. We now pass to another series of stone age remains which must have been contemporary with their latter years, and have been gradually absorbed into the age of bronze. These remains come from the lake-dwellings. But let it not be supposed that these lake-dwellings extended over a short period. A variety of separate pieces of evidence enforce upon us the conclusion that the stone age in Europe endured for at least two thousand years. Even the latter portion of that epoch will allow a cycle vast enough for the lives of the lake-dwellers; for the dwellings did not come to an end at the end of the age of stone, they only began in it. They were seen by Roman eyes almost as late as the beginning of our own era.

For at least two thousand years, then, we may say, the men who lived in the country of the Swiss lakes, and those of Northern Italy, adopted the apparently inexplicable custom of making their dwellings, not upon the solid ground, but upon platforms constructed with infinite trouble above the waters of the lake. And the way they set about it was in this wise: Having chosen their spot if attainable, a sunny shore protected as much as possible from storms, and having a lake-bottom of a soft and sandy nature they proceeded to drive in piles, composed of tree-stems taken from the neighboring forests, from four to eight inches in breadth. These piles had to be felled, and afterwards sharpened, either by fire or a stone axe, then driven in from a raft by the use of ponderous stone mallets; and when we have said that in one instance the number of piles of a lake village has been estimated at from 40,000 to 50,000, the enormous labor of the process will be apparent. This task finished, the piles were levelled at a certain height above the water, and a platform of boards was fastened on with pegs. On the platform were erected huts, probably square or oblong in shape, not more than twenty feet or so in length, adapted however for the use of a single family, and generally furnished, it would appear, with a hearth-stone and a corn-crusher apiece. The huts were made of wattle-work, coated on both sides with clay. Stalls were provided for the cattle, and a bridge of from only ten or twelve to as much as a hundred yards in length led back to the main-land. Over this the cattle must have been driven every day, at least in summer, to pasture on the bank; and no doubt the village community separated for the various occupations of fishing, for hunting, for agriculture, and for tending the cattle. As may be imagined, these wooden villages were in peculiar danger from fire, and a very large number have suffered destruction in this way, a circumstance fortunate for modern science, for many things which had been partially burnt before falling into the lake have, by the coating of charcoal formed round them, been made impervious to the corroding influence of the water. Thus we have preserved the very grain itself, and their loaves or cakes of crushed but not ground meal. The grains are of various kinds of wheat and barley, oats, and millet.

It may be wondered for what object the enormous trouble of erecting these lake-dwellings could have been undertaken; and the only answer which can be given is, that it was to protect their inhabitants from their enemies. Whether each village formed a separate tribe and made war upon its neighbors, or whether the lake-dwellers were a peaceful race fleeing from more savage people of the mainland, is uncertain. There is nothing which leads us to suppose they were of a warlike character, and as far as the arts of peace go they had advanced considerably upon the men of the tumuli. More especially do the woven cloths, sometimes worked with simple but not inartistic patterns, excite our admiration. Ornaments of amber are frequent, and amber must have been brought from the Baltic; while in one settlement, believed to be of the stone age, the presence of a glass bead would seem to imply a commerce with Egypt, the only country in which the traces of glass manufacture at this remote period have been found.' It is believed by good authorities, that the stone age in Europe came to an end about two thousand years before Christ, or at a time nearly that of Abraham, and its shortest duration as we saw must also be considered to be two thousand years.

These men of the lakes stand in no degree behind the mound-builders for the material elements of civilization. Nay, they are in some respects before them. Their life seems to have been more confined and simple than that which was going on in other parts of Europe. Its very peacefulness and simplicity gave men the opportunity for perfecting some of their arts. Thus their agriculture was more careful and more extended than that of the men of the tumuli. Their cattle would appear to have been numerous; all were stall-fed upon the island home, or if in the morning driven out to pasture over the long bridge to the mainland, they were brought home again at night. To agriculture had been added the special art of gardening, for these men cultivated fruit-trees; and they spun hemp and flax, and even constructed it is believed some sort of loom for weaving cloth. Yet for all that, if in these respects they were superior to the men of the tumuli, their life was probably more petty and narrow than the others. There must have been some grandeur in the ideas of men who could have built such enormous tombs and raise those wondrous piles of altar-stones. If the first were made in honor of their chiefs, the existence of such chiefs implies their power of expanding into a wide social life; so too the immense labor which the raising of the cromlechs demanded argues strong if not the most elevated religious ideas. And it has been often and truly remarked that these two elements of progress, social and religious life, are always intimately associated. It is in the common worship more than in the common language that we find the beginning of nationalities. It was so in Greece. The city life grew up around the temple of a particular tutelary deity, and the associations of cities arose from their association in the worship at some common shrine. The common nationality of the Hellenes was kept alive more than anything in the quadrennial games in honor of the Olympian Zeus, just as the special citizenship of Athens found expression in the peculiar worship of the virgin goddess Athênê. So we may well argue from the great stone remains, that man had even then attained some progress in civil government. They show us the extended conditions of tribal government: but the lake-dwellers only give us a picture of the. simplest and narrowest form of the village community. It is with them a complete condition of social equality; there is no appearance of any grade of rank; no hut on these islands is found the larger or better supplied or more cared for than the rest. A condition of things not unlike that which we find in Switzerland at the present day; one favorable to happiness and contentment, to improvement in the simpler arts, but not to wide views of life, or to any great or general progress.

From our various sources of knowledge, then, we gain a slight but not uninteresting picture of man's life in the New Stone Age, and of his slow progress along the road towards civilization. We begin with the hunters and fishers of the shell-mounds, a race of men who may be compared almost exactly with the Lapps and Esquimaux of the present day men without any organization or policy, with no rudiment of art save that of navigation, and almost without an object in life except of supporting the immediate wants of existence. Not indeed that we need suppose them, any more than the Esquimaux or Lapps, without either a religion or such germs of a literature as consist in traditional tales, passed on from father to son. Such seeds of moral and intellectual life are to be found among the rudest savages.

And as time passes on they improve, passing from the hunter state to that of the pastoral,' and from the pastoral to the agricultural ; with all the other growths, arts, and religious and social life, which have been pointed out and which two thousand years or so might well produce.

Then came the discovery of metal; and what is called the Bronze Age the age before iron was found supervened upon the age of stone. In some countries the discovery was natural, and one age followed upon the other in gradual sequence. But in Europe it was not so. The men of the bronze age were a new race sallying out of the East to dispossess the older inhabitants, and if in some places the bronze men and the stone men seem to have gone on for a time side by side, the general character of the change is that of a sudden break. Therefore we do not now proceed to speak of the characteristic civilization of the bronze age. As will be seen hereafter, the bringers of the new weapons belonged to a race concerning whom we have much ampler means of information than is possessed for the first inhabitants of these lands; and we are spared the necessity of drawing all our knowledge from a scrutiny of their arms or tombs. But before we can satisfactorily show who were the successors of the stone-age men in Europe, and whence they came, we must turn aside towards another inquiry, viz., into the origin of language.