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excavations at Troy is, he considers, a dagger of steel four inches 
long. The blade, which is double-edged and in the form of an 
arrow, is in a perfect state of preservation, which Dr. Schliemann 
attributes to the antiseptic power of the red wood ashes mixed with 
charcoal in which he found it embedded, in the large mansion 
close to the gate, twenty-eight feet below Ps surface. He says:— 
‘This is the first object of iron found by nie here, nay, until now I 
had found no trace of iron in any one of the four prehistoric cities 
the ruins and dédr7s of which succeed each other here, neither had 
I found a trace of that metal at Mycenz. Homer freely mentions 
iron, to which he applies three times (Il. vi., 48; x., 3793 Xi, 133) 
the epithet fo/wmétos, that is to say a metal obtained with much 
labour, and, as Mr. Gladstone observed in his preface to my 
Mycene’ :—‘ The poet always mentions it as a rare and valuable 
substance used where great hardness was required, and for objects 
comparatively small and portable; except, indeed, in the case of 
the gates of Tartaros (Il. viii, 15), where he could dispose of as 
much material as he pleased. The aggregate quantity then was 
small ; and the instruments were likely to be carried away on the 
abandonment or destruction of acity. Its absence may, therefore, 
be accounted for, in part by its value, but also, and more especially, 
because it so readily corrodes.’ ‘For all the rest I perfectly agree 
with Mr. Gladstone, but I certainly do not accept his opinion that 
iron embedded in ancient #éér7s can possibly corrode and disappear 
without leaving a trace of its existence. But if iron was so rare 
and precious at the time of Homer, how much rarer and more 
precious must it then not have been at the time of Ilium’s catas- 
trophe, which appears, by the objects of human industry I find 
here, to have preceded the poet by a long number of centuries? 
‘The Greek word for iron (sidéros) can leave no doubt that the 
first iron which was used was meteoric iron, and, as Mr. Birch, of 
the British Museum, assures me, this is confirmed by the ancient 
Egyptian name for that metal.’” 
Mushet tells us that, “The discovery of iron in terrestrial ore 
was probably first made during the conversion of wood into char- 
coal, used by the ancients for domestic purposes, through portions 
