THE IBON, THE BEONZE^ AND THE STONE AGES. 663 



was discovered. Still, this would not prove that bronze must, as 

 has been maintained, have, as being a more complex invention, 

 been a later discovery than that particular modification of iron 

 known as steel. The rigid resistent bronze would make a better 

 weapon, especially for that most efficient process of sword-play, 

 ' giving point/ the thrusting punctim^ as opposed to mere slashing 

 caesim, of the Roman military writers, than would such soft iron as 

 in the absence of the knowledge of converting iron into steel could 

 only have been available to the savages who reduced it. A pike 

 may ' bend bravely,' even when made of good steel, and a fortiori^ 

 as the quotation from Polybius shows, when made only of un- 

 tempered iron. When, however, once the art of making steel out 

 of iron was discovered, and soft iron took on 'the ice-brook's 

 temper/ the wider diffusion of the material, and the greater 

 facilities of this process of manufacturing an equally useful article 

 out of it, caused the displacement of bronze just as many a similar 

 discovery has caused the displacement of many another product of 

 toilsome elaboration by the introduction of another and simpler 

 one. It should not, however, be forgotten that ' cementation ' is a 

 preliminary process to that of hardening and tempering in the 

 manufacture of steel, that it is a process requiring several days as 

 well as the combination of several other conditions if it is to be 

 successful, and that the improbability of pre-historic men stumbling 

 early and easily into the knowledge of a process consisting of a 

 considerable number of heterogeneous operations is, in spite of the 

 now apparent simplicity of those operations, as great, perhaps, as 

 the improbability of their similarly stumbling into the discovery of 

 bronze. 



Coming in the second place to the Bronze Age, and facing the 

 discussions hereinafter to be bibliographised, I have to say that, as 

 against all quotations from old and modern authors, and as against 

 all records, by whomsoever recorded, of the discovery of iron weapons 

 in Bronze Age Tumuli, I am as confident as I can be of anything 

 in Anthropology that no iron will be, though bronze not rarely is, 

 found in Tumuli of the Bronze Period and Round Shape in this 

 country at least. I have been present and assisted in more ways 

 than one at the examination of many 'Round,' ' Bell,' 'Bowl/ 'Cone' 

 shaped Barrows, and in the 'prm,ary interment in such Barrows I 

 have never seen any other metal than bronze. It is common 



