THE IKON, THE BRONZE, AND THE STONE AGES. 671 



writers of copper to the muscles or flesh of an animal, may really 

 have been a comparison of greenish bronze to muscles taking on a 

 greenish hue from decomposition^ and that we should thus save 

 ourselves from supposing that copper, which, as a metal, is eminently 

 ' red,' should have been contrasted by our forefathers with some- 

 thing, iron, to wit, which they compared to blood. At any rate, 

 leaving both mythology and pathology, I may say that Sir John 

 Lubbock has given us excellent reasons for doubting whether 

 Europe, or at least the western part of it, ever went through a pure 

 copper stage, as America, so rich in native copper, did. And as 

 regards metallic tin being used for weapons at least, I have come 

 upon only a single statement which could bear such a meaning ; 

 this statement is given by Klemm, ' Germanische Alterthumskunde,' 

 p. 19, in the following words: 'Ein Stiick aus reinem Zinn fand 

 Kortum in der Ruhenthal Grabstatte,' s. 8. T05. It is plain, how- 

 ever, that this may have been a ' find ' of an ornament as dis- 

 tinguished from an implement made of unalloyed metallic tin. 



There are two Greek words standing at the end of line 612 of 

 the 'Agamemnon' of Aeschylus, which mean 'baths for copper/ but 

 which are usually translated ' dyeing of copper ' and are supposed to 

 be a proverbial mode of indicating an impossibility, or, as the Ger- 

 mans put it, an ' Unding.' I strongly suspect that these words 

 have attained this secondary signification, not from any reference to 

 colouring, but simply to ' tempering,' and that the mode of temper- 

 ing bronze having been a secret, it has to be considered something 

 supra- and ultimately contra-nmiuvsl. If this suggestion is true, we 

 have in it a fresh argument for the view which teaches that the 

 discovery of alloying copper with tin was extra-European in origin. 

 There is another new argument for the same conclusion, and for the 

 corollary to it, that bronze, like the Jade, Jadeit, and Nephrit of 

 the preceding or Stone Period, and like all imported articles in such 

 times, must have been scarce and highly valued ; and this argument 

 lies in the fact that the use of stone weapons survived so long after 

 the introduction of this alloy. This was forced upon me in the ex- 

 amination this year of certain barrows in Somersetshire, proved to 

 be of the Bronze Period by the discovery in them of bronze weapons, 

 with burnt human bones, in which worked flints were in such 

 abundance, that had it not been for the discovery of the bronze 

 implements, we might almost have supposed* that we were deahng 



