398 EARLY MAN IN BRITAIN. [CIIAP.XI. 



They were probably the result of the want of tin neces- 

 sary for the manufacture of bronze. Copper by itself 

 would not be very much more useful for cutting 

 purposes than stone, on account of its softness, and 

 therefore is not likely to have superseded stone, which 

 is so much more widely spread, and to the use of 

 which mankind had been accustomed for many cen- 

 turies. The native copper of Lake Superior has been 

 worked by the Eed Indians from an unknown period ; 

 and had it offered them a material much better than 

 stone, there would have been an age of Copper in 

 North America. The few implements of that metal 

 which have been discovered do not afford any evi- 

 dence of this. At the time of the discovery of the 

 New World the peoples of Peru and Mexico used bronze, 

 while the ruder American tribes were in the Neolithic 

 stage of culture. It is therefore improbable 'that copper, 

 should have marked a stage in human progress in 

 Europe, where native copper is so rare, and where the 

 ores would have to be reduced to obtain the metal. 

 The appearance of a definite compound such as bronze 

 implies that it has been introduced into Europe from 

 some other area, in which we may suppose that the 

 ingenuity of man was at work for a long period in 

 finding out, by continual experiments, the proper- 

 ties both of copper and of tin, ultimately combin- 

 ing them together in the proportions which are so 

 generally observed in the implements and weapons of 

 the Bronze age. There is no trace of any such series of 

 experiments having been carried out in Europe. 1 The 

 origin of bronze, and the source from which bronze was 



1 General Lane Fox thinks it probable that there was a Copper age in 

 Europe, and accounts for the scarcity of the implements by the hypothesis 



