TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION H. 607 
perforated for suspension. This association of javelins of both metals puts it 
beyond doubt that weapons of both metals were in use at the same time, as is 
represented in Homer. If a bard had been celebrating the exploits of the owner 
of this set of javelins he would surely have said that he ‘smote his foe with the 
bronze’ (chalkos), even though he had slain his adversary with one of his iron 
specimens. 
3. Report on Archaeological and Ethnological Investigations in Crele. 
See Reports, p. 224. 
4. Discussion on Megalithic Monuments and their Bulders. 
(i) Introduction by Professor G. Exxior Smitu, M.A., M.D., F.B.S. 
I need not explain the circumstances that impelled me to intrude my opinions 
in a domain of ethnological inquiry of which I have no special knowledge beyond 
the mere statement that collateral studies of the remains of the people of the 
Megalithic Age in the Mediterranean area suggested a solution of the problems 
in question which leading authorities on megalithic monuments have frankly 
confessed their inability to solve. ; 
No adequate explanation of the significance of dolmens, cromlechs, alignments, 
and all the other works in stone associated with them, can be found unless due 
recognition is given to (a) the identity of the ideas which prompted their con- 
struction, and the essential resemblances in their plan; (b) their geographical 
distribution—their absence from large central continental areas, and their wide 
extent along continuous coastal and insular territories; (c) the chronological 
sequence of their construction, the site of their earliest appearance being some- 
where in the neighbourhood of the Eastern Mediterranean, and progressively later 
in date as we go either west or east—towards Ireland and Scandinavia, or Japan 
and the Pacific Islands, respectively ; (d) the coincidence of their first appearance 
in most lands with the last phase of the Stone Age or the commencement of the 
Age of Metals; and (c) the improbability of theories of independent evolution, 
among widely separated races of mankind, of identical ideas which find expres: 
sion in the same way in buildings of similar design and materials. 
If, as some of my critics have argued, the impulse to build megalithic funerary 
raonuments was a phase of culture through which all mankind has passed, why 
were the people of Central Europe exempt from this instinct—for this hypo- 
thetical inborn impulse to erect elaborate stone monuments just as the ants 
buiid their hills can only be regarded as an instinct—when their littoral relatives 
in the Mediterranean area and on the north-west of Europe were stirred by it to 
eut rock-tombs and build dolmens? Why, also, if this hypothesis has any basis 
of fact, did the ancient inhabitants of Ireland not get their ‘impulse’ until more 
than a millennium later, and the people of Japan until two millennia later, than 
the people of Egypt?’ 
lt is now generally admitted? that in the Mediterranean and Western Euro- 
pean areas the erection of megalithic monuments did not begin until the latter 
part (Aineolithic) of the Age of Stone, or the commencement of the Age of Metals. 
No theory that leaves this chronological coincidence out of account can have any 
cogency. ; 
_.The most ancient copper tools so far discovered and accurately dated come 
from Egypt. In Egypt every stage in the development of the art of working 
metals is known; and so far as we know this knowledge was acquired in Egypt 
earlier than elsewhere. Egypt also supplied, in the habits of her prehistoric 
inhabitants, the predisposing circumstances that led to the discovery of copper 
1 See Geo. Coffey, New Grange (Brugh na Boinne) and other Incised Tumuli 
in Ireland, Dublin, 1912; and the writings of Gowland, Pastor, and others on 
Japanese megalithic monuments, Zeitsch. f. Hthnol., 1910, p. 601. 
* See the excellent summaries of literature in L’ Anthropologie; also Peet, 
The Stone and Bronze Ages in Italy, 1909, chap, xi. 
