136 EDGE TOOLS IN EARLY BRITAIN. 



and weapons had come into Britain, and if at that later time 

 there was a less call for bronze edge tools, other bronze goods 

 might still have been welcome to British buyers. 



" It was not suddenly or in a very short time that stonen 

 tools were given up for bronze ones, or bronze for steel ones, 

 by all tool-wielding hands. The tool of the new kind would 

 be chosen instead of that of the older one on a rating of the 

 cost of each, and the time and hand-force spent on the same 

 work with each. 



The hand-skill of the British maker of stonen-tools was so 

 high, and the bronze ones might be so costly, as reckoned in 

 the work by which he could buy it, that he kept on a long 

 while his old tool. 



" Although the English have been in North America for so 

 many generations, and went thither, so to speak, with iron 

 tools in their hands, and as their settlements have spread 

 westward tribe after tribe must have known of steel, yet 

 even now it seems there may be found red men who with 

 the old skill in stone chipping make for themselves stonen 

 tools instead of buying iron ones. 



" It does not follow that because stonen-tools found now 

 in the hands of tribes of the South Seas are in shape and in 

 angle of edge, and curve of the cutting side of the blade, most 

 closely like those of the old tribes of Europe, that one tribe 

 copied any pattern of the tools of the northern ones. The 

 shape comes by experience from the laws of nature. A man 

 without metal who wills to cut wood, and takes stone as 

 the best matter within his reach for an edge tool, finds that 

 if the edge is too thin for the stone it will break off, and if it 

 be too thick it will hardly cut, and so by experience he will 

 be driven to give his tool the thickness and curve of edge 

 and side which is best between the two evils of breaking and 

 bluntness, and these in the like stone would be alike all over 

 the world, and would vary with varieties of stone ; and this 

 force of natural law on man's work, and other doings through 

 his experience, may be the cause of likeness of stonen tools, 

 and weapons with ancient tribes and those of our days." 



