THE BRONZE AXE. 221. 



at first a mere substitution of an easier for a more 

 difficult material. He little knew whither his discovery 

 tended. It was pure human laziness that urged the 

 change. How nice to save yourself all that long trouble 

 of chipping and polishing, with ceaseless toil, in favour of 

 a stone which you could melt at one go and pour while 

 hot into a ready-made mould ! It must have looked, by 

 comparison, like weapon-making by magic ; for properly 

 to cut and polish a stone axe is the work of weeks and 

 weeks of elbow-grease. Yet here, in a moment, a better 

 hatchet could be turned out all finished ! But the implied 

 effects lay deeper far than the neolithic hunter could ever 

 have imagined. The bronze axe was the beginning of 

 civilization ; it brought the steam-engine, the telephone, 

 woman's rights, and the county councillor directly in its 

 train. "With the eye of faith, had he only possessed that 

 useful optical organ, the Stone Age artizan might doubt- 

 less have beheld Pears' soap and the deceased wife's 

 sister looming dimly in the remote future. Till that 

 moment human life had been almost stationary : thence- 

 forth, it proceeded by leaps and bounds, like a kangaroo 

 society, on its upward path towards triumphant democ- 

 racy and the penny post. The nineteenth century and 

 all its wiles hung by a thread upon the success of his 

 melting pot. 



Indeed, the whole history of human civilization has 

 been one of a constantly accelerated progress. The Older 

 Stone Age, when men knew only how to chip flint imple- 

 ments, but hadn't yet invented the art of grinding and 

 polishing them, was one of immense and incalculable 

 duration, to be reckoned perhaps by tens of thousands of 



