II.] THE METAL AGES. 19 



culture. His conclusions are based on the study of about 500 

 copper objects found in Hungary and preserved in the Buda 

 Pesth collections. Reviewing all the facts attesting a Copper 

 Age in Central Europe, Egypt, Italy, Cyprus, Troy, Scandinavia, 

 North Asia, and other lands, he concludes that a Copper Age 

 may have sprung up independently wherever the ore was found, 

 as in the Ural and Altai Mountains, Italy, Spain, Britain, Cyprus, 

 Sinai ; such culture being generally indigenous, and giving evi- 

 dence of more or less characteristic local features 1 . In fact we 

 know for certain that such an independent Copper Age was 

 developed not only in the region of the Great Lakes of North 

 America, but also amongst the Bantu peoples of Katanga and 

 other parts of Central Africa. Copper is not an alloy like bronze, 

 but a soft, easily-worked metal occurring in large quantities and 

 in a tolerably pure state near the surface in many parts of the 

 world. The wonder is, not that it should have been found and 

 worked at a somewhat remote epoch in several different centres, 

 but that its use should have been so soon superseded in so many 

 places by the bronze alloys. 



From copper to bronze, however, the passage was slow and 

 progressive, the proper proportion of tin, which 

 was probably preceded in some places by an alloy A 

 of antimony, having been apparently arrived at by 

 repeated experiments often carried out with no little skill by those 

 prehistoric metallurgists. 



As suggested by Bibra in 1869, the ores of different metals 

 would appear to have been at first smelted together empirically, 

 and the process continued until satisfactory results were obtained. 

 Hence the extraordinary number of metals, of which percentages 

 are found in some of the earlier specimens, such as those of the 

 Elbing Museum, which on analysis yielded tin, lead, silver, iron, 

 antimony, arsenic, sulphur, nickel, cobalt, and zinc in varying 

 quantities 2 . 



1 Ncuere Stitdien iiber die Kupferzeit, in Zeitschr.f. Et/i., 1896, No. 2. 



2 Otto Helm, Chemische Untersuchungen vorgeschichtlicher Bronzen. in 

 Zeitschr.f. Eth., 1897, No. 2. This authority agrees with Hempel's view that 

 further research will confirm the suggestion that in Transylvania (Hungary) 

 " eine Kupfer-Antimonmischung vorangegangen, welche zugleich die Bronze- 

 kultur vorbereitete " (ib. p. 128). 



