206 THE STONE AGE — PAST AND PEESENT. 



bronze castings from the latter country are even more remark- 

 able.i 



How the arts of working gold, silver, copper, and bronze 

 came into America, we do not know, nor can we even tell 

 whether their appearance on the Northern and Southern Con- 

 tinent was independent or not. It is possible to trace Mexican 

 connexion down to Nicaragua, and perhaps even to the Isth- 

 mus of Panama, while on the other hand the northern inhabi- 

 tants of South ^America were not unacquainted with the na- 

 tions farther down the continent. But no certain proof of 

 connexion or intercourse of any kind between Mexico and 

 Peru seems as yet to have been made out. All that we know 

 certainly is that gold, silver, copper, tin, and bronze had there 

 intruded themselves among the implements and ornaments of 

 worked stone, though they had scarcely made an approach to 

 driving them out of use, and that the traditions of both conti- 

 nents ascribed their higher culture to certain foreigners who 

 were looked upon as supernatural beings. If we reason upon 

 the supposition that these remarkably unanimous legends may 

 perhaps contain historical, in combination with mythical ele- 

 ments, the question suggests itself, where, for a thousand or 

 fifteen hundred years before the Spanish discovery, were men 

 to be found who could teach the Mexicans and Peruvians to 

 make bronze, and could not teach them to smelt and work 

 iron ? The people of Asia seem the only men on whose behalf 

 such a claim can be sustained at all. The Massagetse of Cen- 

 tral Asia were in the Bronze Age in the time of Herodotus, 

 who, describing their use of bronze for spear and arrow-heads, 

 battle-axes, and other things, and of gold rather for ornamental 

 purposes, remarks that they make no use of iron or silver, for 

 they have none in their country, while gold and bronze abound.^ 

 Four centuries later, Strabo modifies this remai-k, saying that 

 they have no silver, little iron, but abundance of gold and 

 bronze.^ The Tatars were in the Iron Age when visited by 

 medieval travellers, and the history of the transition from 

 bronze to iron in Central Asia, of which we seein to have here 



' Ewbank, ' Brazil ;' New York, 1856, pp. 45i-463. 

 2 Herod., i. 215. ' Strabo, xi. 8, 6. 



