from the Museum of the Royal Irish Academy. 327 



proportion existed in tlie quantities of the component metals of these bronzes, 

 so, on the other, it seems erroneous to infer, as Mr. Wilson, in his Archseology 

 of Scotland* has done, that the absence of such invariable composition neces- 

 sarily proves that these antiquities were the work of native artists, who were 

 unable to combine the metals they used with the accuracy and certainty of 

 foreign metallurgists of the same epoch. For, passing over all the difficulties 

 which the primitive modes of reduction of the respective ores, and the impurities 

 consequently retained by the metals, must have presented to the early manufactu- 

 rers of any nation, and supposing the copper and tin used to be each perfectly 

 pure, the task of producing from these materials an alloy of definite and uniform 

 composition is, even at the present day, one requiring great skill, both in the 

 actual process of melting, and in the previous construction of furnaces, &c., so 

 that for the purpose and at the period of the manufacture of the articles in 

 question it must almost be deemed impossible of accomplishment.f 



Hence the observed variations of composition between the several bronze 

 antiquities found in Ireland by no means negative the possibility, to say the 

 least, of their having been produced by a single people, and that one, far ad- 

 vanced in the art of metallurgy for the age to which these articles are referred. 



Yet, although these diiferences of composition are probably to a very great 

 extent owing to the want of suiEcient skill and appliances to produce from the 

 same materials uniform results, — difficulties enhanced to the last degree where 

 many small articles are to be cast, at separate operations, and from alloys formed 

 in small quantities, — and are therefore to be looked upon as unintentional, — yet 

 some marks of design may perhaps be traced in the differences between the al- 

 loys of articles intended for different purposes. Thus we find two of the celts 

 (Nos. 2 and 4) and the war scythe (No. 7) consist almost entirely of copper, 

 the quantity of tin amounting in No. 2 to only 1-09 per cent., a proportion so 

 small that it might be supposed to be derived merely from the addition of frag- 

 ments of old bronze to the copper, or from imperfect reduction of the ore. 



* Page 249. 



f The principal difficulty arises from the "burning out" of the tin, which takes place with 

 great rapidity on access of air to the melted bronze. The column in the Place Vendome, Paris, 

 was a remarkable instance of mismanagement in this respect, almost" the whole of the tin having 

 disappeared from the metal employed to cast some of the blocks of bronze. 



