THE BRONZE AXE, 



229 



from the proud invader. Many of the bracelets are 

 extremely beautiful ; but, strange to say, as if on purpose 

 to spite the common prejudice about the degeneracy of 

 modern man, they are all so small in girth as to betoken 

 a race with arms and legs hardly any bigger than the 

 Finns or Laplanders. Of the clasps, buttons, and 

 buckles I will say nothing here. I have enumerated 

 enouofh to su^^jf^est to even the most casual observer the 



'or5^ 



vastness of the revolution which the Bronze Age wrought 

 in the mode of life and the civilisation of ancient man. 



Bronze found our early ancestor, in fact, a half- 

 developed savage : it left him a semi-civilized Homeric 

 Greek. It came in upon a world of skin-clad hunters 

 and fishers: it went out upon a world of Phoenician 

 navigators, Egyptian architects, Achaean poets, and 

 Roman soldiers. And all this wide difference was 

 wrought in a period of some eight or ten centuries at the 

 outside, almost entirely by the advent of the simple 

 bronze axe. 



