338 GENERAL VIEWS ON ARCHAEOLOGY. 



very late. But this is nothing but pure and simple conjecture, to 

 which may be opposed the following considerations : 



Ancient Commercial Relations. The presence of foreign mineral 

 substances, flint, and nephrite, among the remains of the age of stone 

 in Switzerland, would indicate commercial relations with distant parts 

 even from the highest antiquity. This ought not to surprise us, when 

 we see that the Indians of the United States, who belong, by their 

 civilization, to the age of stone, are very fond of traveling, and carry 

 the beautiful red pipe-stone of Coteau des Prairies to great distances 

 from its bed. 



The example of these Indians of the United States may perhaps be 

 quoted in favor of the opinion, that the use of stone and metals might 

 have existed simultaneously in the same country, so that the difference 

 of these materials in Europe might arise, not from different ages, but 

 from different degrees of civilization or of wealth at the same epoch 

 among the same people. But the case in question rather proves the 

 contrary, for the Indians have been in such haste to adopt iron, that 

 they no longer make use of their ancient instruments of flint, except 

 for the purpose of amulets, and they have even forgotten how to make 

 them. These articles have thus passed, among them, into the class of 

 antiquities. 



During the age of bronze a regular commerce, as has been seen, must 

 have necessarily existed between the different portions of Europe, where 

 there prevailed a tolerably uniform civilization, at least in what apper- 

 tains to the technical arts. 1 



How much more likely it is that similar commercial relations, and 

 a similar uniformity and contemporaneousness in the most important 

 elements of industry must have existed in Europe from the earliest 

 times of the age of iron. As regards the North, in particular, it ap- 

 pears that at this epoch commercial relations were entertained not only 

 with the South, but perhaps even with the East. For the bronze vases, 

 above alluded to, display among others, such animated figures of lions, 

 that they must, one would think, have come from the hands of artists 

 who had these animals before their eyes. Other articles which the 

 South, perhaps Phenician industry, furnished to the North, are the 

 31illefiori, 2 some specimens of which have been found in Denmark and 

 Sweden. In return the North supplied ancient Greece with amber 

 from the Baltic. 



It is also known that the shores of the North Sea were visited in the 

 fourth century before the Christian era by Greek navigators, who must 

 have reached a latitude of 64° or 6G°, for they allude to a duration of 

 two or three hours as that of the shortest night. They may even per- 

 haps have penetrated to the Arctic Circle, of which they had, at any 

 rate, a direct or indirect knowledge, inasmuch as they knew that the 



1 The Museum of Copenhagen contains a scries of Italian antiquities of the age of bronze, 

 corresponding very well with what is found in the north. 



2 Glass balls, with an interior nucleus of colored glass mosaic work, perhaps enamel. 

 They are found in the Etruscan and Egyptian burial places. Minutoli. Uber die Anferti- 

 gung und Nutzanwendung der farbigen Glaisur beis den Alten. Berlin, 1836. 



