670 ON THE THEEE PERIODS KNOWN AS 



the adoption of improved weapons of war, as ecc hypothesi they were 

 in the Bronze Age. and cle facto in the Iron Ag-e, of the inhabitants 

 of these islands, Schleswig-Holstein might still have been an 

 appanage of Denmark. 



I take this opportunity of remarking that anybody who will 

 take the trouble of reading the few lines which come in Hesiod's 

 ' Works and Days,' 144-148, just before the often-quoted line as to 

 the sequence of the Bronze and Iron Ages, will find that he had 

 somehow become as much impressed with the vast size and brute 

 strength of the bronze-using people as I, in spite of the currently 

 accepted statements as to the small hands of the men of that era, 

 have become from actual handling of the bones. Bronze Age 

 tumuli, however, may have been excavated, indeed, as the history of 

 the examination of the Tomb of Theseus, at Scyros, shows, they 

 actually were excavated in the days of the very early bards, such 

 as the one just referred to. 



VirgiFs line * 



* Grandiaque effossis mirabltur ossa sepulcris ' 



expresses the tendency to magnify the size of such trouvailles ; still 

 there was solid fact for what Hesiod wrote, /.<?., and Ovid might 

 have given more space to insisting upon this very distinctive cha- 

 racteristic of the Bronze Age, than he has in his reproduction of 

 Hesiod, Metamorph. i. 125-127 : — 



•Tertia post illam successit ahenea proles, 

 Saevior ingeniis, et ad horrida promptior arma ; 

 Non scelerata tamen: de duro est ultima ferro.' 



In modern Europe we have but some half-dozen millions of men 

 under arms at the present moment, and we have lost by war in the 

 last twenty-five years something under a couple of millions only, by 

 the accidents inseparable from modern fighting ; and it is difficult 

 for us, consequently, to realise, even approximatively, the terrible 

 conditions prevalent in the 'bella, horrida bell a' of the Bronze 

 Age. Hesiod appears to have been much impressed by what tra- 

 dition told him of it ; he does not, however, appear to have thought 

 his own time so very much better, as we have such good reason for 

 thinking ours is. 



I have sometimes thought that the comparison (for which see 

 Max Miiller, Lectures, ii. p. 256, 8th edition, 1875) by the Sanskrit 



