254 Original Articles. [April, 



Some of the Scandinavian barrows are marked ont in strange shapes 

 by rough blocks of stone, placed sometimes in geometrical figures, 

 more frequently in the figure of a ship, with rowers, benches, masts, 

 &c. These would indicate a similar taste to that of the later inhabi- 

 tants of the same peninsula. It is not unlikely that many of the 

 things or parliaments were held in these enclosures. 



It was said before that the inhabitants of the Stone Age either 

 had forgotten the use and manufacture of metals in their dispersion, 

 or had belonged to a race outlying the family of Aryans, and were 

 unacquainted with the arts of the great Indo-European nations. Sud- 

 denly the metallurgic art revived, and with it a higher condition of 

 cultivation and of taste. Immediately upon the Stone Age we come 

 to a Bronze Age. Here and there * a few pure copper implements 

 are discovered, but these are scarcely sufficient to warrant a belief of a 

 general Copper Age ever existing throughout Europe. f The introduc- 

 tion of bronze, then, is most interesting, especially to Englishmen, since 

 we know of no source whence one of the component parts of this alloy, J 

 tin, could have been procured, save the early wrought tin mines of 

 Cornwall. On the Continent the Bronze era is supposed to have 

 begun with the immigration of a new race. The Northern Archaeolo- 

 gists believe that bronze marks the handicraft of the Kelt. No such 

 change is observable in Britain. 



In the midst of the Stone Age we have seen that a great improve- 

 ment in the mode of manufacturing implements accompanied a differ- 

 ence in the conformation of the skull, and from that period on to the 

 times of the Anglo-Saxons no great diversity in the shape of the 

 cranium is observable. It seems prolable, then, that in the first 

 period of the Stone Age a cymbecephalic race, akin to the Basques, 

 Lapps, and Finns, dwelt in this island or in some portion of it ; that 

 a Keltic race, the first wave of the Aryan family, passed over from 

 the Continent armed with better-made stone § weapons and endowed 

 with greater capabilities of improvement, and, according to the hateful 

 theory of modern colonizers, when the superior civilization met the 

 inferior, they " improved the former off the face of the earth ;" that 

 these Kelts procured by some means, either by contact with Phoenician 

 or Iberian immigrants, or some local tribe, of which we have now no 



* In the Museum of the Royal Irish Academy, several specimens of copper 

 celts are collected. See the Catalogue, edited by Sir W. E. W. Wilde. It is not 

 unlikely that the Copper Age may have existed longer in Ireland than in these 

 islands, where tin is so abundant. 



t In North America, a Copper Age lasted a considerable time. This was 

 owing to the immense stores of native copper to be found on the shores of Lake 

 Superior. The Indians could fashion this copper with their stone hammers with- 

 out any knowledge of metallurgic arts properly so called. 



J The ancient bronze is always of certain fixed proportions of tin and copper. 

 Zinc seems to have been unknown for long ages afterwards. 



§ The Kelts, we must imagine, had lost during their migrations the whole 

 practice of the metallurgic arts known to the entire family when in Asia. This 

 was almost a necessity from their wanderings, though the traditions, and, to some 

 extent, the knowledge of the working of metals in a rude manner had not been 

 completely forgotten. 



