68 DR. DANIEL WILSON ON 
ancient American missed it, it was not for want of opportunity. Examples, as has been 
noted, of the accidental fusion of copper, by the sacrificial fires of the Mound-builders, 
repeatedly occur in the mounds of the Ohio valley. But no gifted native alchymist was 
prompt to read the lesson, and turn it to practical account. 
Asia and Europe appear to have passed by a natural transition, step by step, from 
their rudest stages of lithic art, to polished stone, and then to implements of metal. Some 
of the steps were doubtless very slow. Worsaae believes that the use of bronze prevailed 
in Denmark “five or six hundred years before the birth of Christ.” * In Egypt it un- 
doubtedly was known at a greatly earlier date. I still incline to my early formed opinion, 
that gold was the first metal worked. Found in nuggets, it could scarcely fail to attract 
attention. It was easy to fashion into shape; and some of the small, highly polished 
stone hammers seem fitter for this than any other work.f The abundant gold ornaments 
of the new world at the time of the discovery of Mexico and Peru accord with this idea. 
The like attraction of the bright native copper, is proved by its employment among the 
southern Indians for personal ornaments; and in this way the economic use of the metals 
may have been first suggested. * 
From the working of gold nuggets, or of virgin copper, with the hammer, to the smelting 
of the ores, was no trifling step; but that knowledge once gained, the threshold of civilization 
and true progress had been reached. The history ofthe grand achievement is embodied in the 
earliest myths both of the old and the new world. Tubal-Cain, Dædalus, Hephaestus, 
Vulcan, Velund, Galant, the Luno of the Celtic Fingal, and Wayland, the Saxon smith-god, 
are but legendary variations of the first worker by whom the gift of metallurgy was com- 
municated to man; and so too the new world has its Quetzalcoatl, or Velund of the 
Aztecs, the divine instructor of their ancestors in the use of the metals. But whatever 
be the date of this wise instructor, no share of the knowledge communicated by him to 
that favoured race appears to have ever penetrated northward of the Mexican gulf. 
It is vain to urge such dubious evidence as the fancied traces of a mould-ridge, or the 
solitary example of a casting of uncertain age, in proof of a knowledge of the furnace and 
the crucible among any North American tribe. Everywhere in Europe the soil yields not 
only its buried relics of gold, copper and bronze, but also stone and bronze moulds 
in which implements and personal ornaments were cast. When the ingenious systematizing 
of Danish archeologists had familiarized the students of antiquity with the idea of a suc- 
cession of stone, bronze, and iron periods, in the history of Europe, the question naturally 
followed whether metallurgy did not begin, there, as elsewhere, in the easy working of 
virgin copper. Dr. Latham accordingly remarked, in his “Ethnology of the British 
Islands,” on the supposition that no unalloyed copper relics had been found in Britain : 
“Stone and bone first; then bronze, or copper and tin combined; but no copper alone. 
I cannot get over this hiatus; cannot imagine a metallurgic industry beginning with the 
use of alloys.” It was a mistake, however, to assume that no copper relics had ever been 
found. At first it had been taken for granted that all such implements were of the familiar 
alloy. But so soon as the importance of the distinction was recognized, examples of pure 
copper were forthcoming. So early as 1822, Sir David Brewster described a large axe of 

* Primæval Antiquities, p. 135. : 
{ Prehistoric Annals of Scotland, first ed, 1851, p, 214., second ed. vol. i, p. 331, 
