THE BRONZE AXE. 223 



Man did not then live by slaughter alone. Hand-made 

 pottery and rude tissues of flax are found in neolithic lake 

 dwellings in Switzerland. Agriculture was already 

 practised in a feeble way on small open clearings, 

 cautiously cleaved with fire or hewn with the tomahawk 

 in the native forests. The cow, the sheep, and the goat 

 were more or less domesticated, though the horse was 

 yet riderless ; and the pastoral had therefore, to some 

 extent, superseded the pure hunting stage. But what 

 inroad could the stone hatchet make unaided upon the 

 virgin forests of those remote days ? The neolithic 

 clearing must have been a mere stray oasis in a desert of 

 woodland, like the villages of the New Guinea savages at 

 the present day, lying few and far between among vast 

 stretches of primaeval forest. 



With the advent of bronze, everything was different ; 

 and the difference showed itself with extraordinary 

 rapidity. One may compare the revolution effected by 

 bronze in the early world, indeed, with the revolution 

 effected by railways in our own time ; only the neolithic 

 world had been so very simple a one that the change 

 was perhaps even more marvellous in its suddenness and 

 its comprehensiveness. Metal itself implied metal- work- 

 ing ; and metal- working brought about, not only the arts 

 of smelting and casting, but also endless incidental arts 

 of design and decoration. The bronze hatchets, for 

 example, to take our typical implement, begin by being 

 mere copies of the stone originals ; but, as time goes 

 on, they acquire rapidly innumerable improvements. 

 First, metal is economized in the upper part which fits 

 into the handle, while the lower or cutting edge ia 



