662 ON THE THREE PERIODS KNOWN AS 



barbarian came up ferox virihus, brandishing his broadsword, its 

 downward strokes were parried, and the malleable iron, glancing 

 downwards, bent as malleable iron will do, and left its gigantic 

 owner at the mercy of an Italian, some five feet six inches in 

 stature, who then brought into this sword-play a weapon which he 

 had been taught to use puiictim, non caesim. The same tactics 

 succeeded at CuUoden^ as the tactic of thrusting and giving point 

 always will succeed when masses of men in rows, not isolated 

 individuals merely, are pitted against each other on the thrusting 

 versus the slashing plan, though the slashing sw^ord at Culloden 

 was of good steel enough. The point for our present purpose in 

 this story of the victory of Flaminius over the Insubrian Gauls 

 lies in the proof it gives us of the existence, so lately in the world's 

 history as B.C. 224, of a warrior-race fighting with soft iron instead 

 of steel swords. 



The red kidney iron ore, which we know so well from the fact of 

 such large fortunes having been made out of it in the country 

 lying north of Ulverston, and that other hematite known as 

 * hematite brun,' ^ Brauneisenerz,' ' Sumpferz,' and the specular 

 iron ore of Elba and Norway, are widely 'distributed,' very rich 

 in their percentage of iron, and allow of its being easily (even if 

 wastefuUy, as we should consider it) extracted. In the metallic 

 state, iron is seldom met with naturally ; as the ' Dictionary of 

 Chemistry,' suh voc, p. 335, tells us, telluric iron is very rare ; and 

 meteoric iron, the other variety of native metallic iron, now that 

 the common Greek name for iron is known not to have any relation 

 to any sidereal origin, but to express simply the dew-like out- 

 sweating of the metal as reduced in the primitive ' bloomeries ' of 

 those early Dactyli, Elfins, and Dwarfs, whom we know as ' Tubal 

 Cains,' ' Vulcans,' ' Sindris,' and ' Wayland Smiths,' has lost any 

 claim which it may have been supposed to have had to being 

 considered the primitive source of iron weapons. Hence it is of the 

 utmost consequence to keep in mind the fact that certain widely 

 diff'ased ores of iron are very easy of reduction, as the examples 

 furnished by the metallurgy of certain African negroes, and of wild 

 tribes in India and in Borneo, abundantly prove. And it is possible 

 enough that in pre-historic times one of the more easily reduced 

 ores of iron may have been reduced, and even found to be malleable, 

 before not only bronze but even the mode of reducing a copper ore 



