THE IKON, THE BKONZE, AND THE STONE AGES. 669 



rate there can be no doubt that in this country the skeletons of the 

 Bronze Period belonged to much larger, and stronger, and taller 

 men than did the skeletons of the Long Barrow stone-using folk 

 who procured them. In some parts of England the contrast in 

 this matter of size between the men of the Bronze and those of 

 the Stone Age is as great as that now existing between the Maori 

 and the gentle Hindoo ; and in some, though not in all, parts, the 

 Bronze-users appear to have as entirely extirpated the Stone-users, 

 as the Maoris, in their cannibal days, would have extirpated any 

 similarly weaker race. The facts as seen by me, when in company 

 with Canon Greenwell, and upon other occasions, appear to me to 

 justify some such statement as this, as to the introduction of bronze 

 into this country. The stone-using inhabitants of Great Britain, 

 if not also of Ireland, may have had their first introduction to a 

 knowledge of bronze in the way of peaceful barter and commerce. 

 Some probability is given to such a view as this by the fact that 

 some of the earliest bronze axes are evidently moulded upon the pat- 

 tern furnished by stone weapons, just as in North America, where 

 there was a Copper Age, the copper arrow-heads are modelled 

 (see Lubbock, * Pre-historic Times,' sec. ed., 1869, p. 245) on the 

 type of their stone ones. But with improved and advanced Bronze 

 weapons in this country, we find, invariably within my experience, 

 an improved and advanced race of men, so far as powerful limbs, 

 tallness of stature, and capacious crania, do make one race of men 

 superior to another. This race of men, besides their physical, pre- 

 sent us with many ceremonial and other differences ; their burial 

 mounds are round ; their pottery is of another kind, or kinds rather, 

 as they have funeral as well as other wares, the former of which the 

 stone men had not ; the ornaments they buried with their dead are 

 of a different kind, type, and material ; finally, the numbers of 

 dead interred in round barrows, and the numbers of round barrows 

 themselves, are very much greater than those of the dead interred 

 in long barrows, and than those of the round barrows themselves. 

 All this seems to me to point to a conquest of this country having 

 been effected by Bronze-using invaders, who came in great numbers, 

 probably as has been elsewhere suggested, from the Cimbric penin- 

 sula, which was once again in the Iron Age, viz. in the Iron Age 

 of Swegen and Cnut, an officina gentium victricum. If the Danes 

 in a recent war had been as much in advance of their enemies in 



