112 BRONZE OF THE ANCIENTS. [Ch. X. 



been found at Tiefenau, near Berne, in ground supposed to have been 

 a battle-field ; and their date appears to have been anterior to the 

 great Eoman invasion of Northern Europe, though perhaps not long 

 before that event.* 



. The period of bronze must have been one of foreign commerce, as 

 tin, which enters into this metallic mixture in the proportion of about 

 ten per cent, to the copper, was obtained by the ancients chiefly from 

 Cornwall. From that country it is supposed to have been supplied at 

 one time by the Phoenicians to the Greeks, as well as to all the inhabi- 

 tants of the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. Even the tin said 

 to have come from Iberia, or Spain, is imagined by many anti- 

 quaries to have been first shipped from the Cassiterides, or Cornwall, 

 to Cadiz, f At a later period we learn from Diodorus that ingots of 

 tin were shipped from Iktis, or St. Michael's Mount, in Cornwall, and 

 conveyed over the channel to the opposite coast, and thence on the 

 backs of horses across Gaul, in about thirty days, to Massilia or Mar- 

 seilles, from whence the Romans obtained it. J 



The Greeks are described by Homer in the Iliad as armed with 

 XaXaoq, usually translated brass, which is now ascertained, by a pre- 

 cise analysis of ancient Greek armor and coins, to have consisted not 

 of copper and zinc, but of copper and tin, or what we now call bronze. 

 Contemporaneously with bronze, iron was also in use among the 

 ancients, even from very remote times ; but so long as the art of 

 making steel by blending iron in certain chemical proportions with 

 carbon was unknown, or still in its infancy, bronze seems to have 

 competed successfully with iron in the construction of all cutting im- 

 plements. The best definition, perhaps, of the age of iron yet pro- 

 posed, is that which describes it as the period when this metal had, 

 for the most part, superseded bronze in all instruments requiring a 

 sharp cutting edge. It is remarkable that in Herculaneum and 

 Pompeii, which was buried under the ashes of Vesuvius in the year 7f, 

 nearly a thousand years after Homer's time, the prevailing metal of 

 which the agricultural, culinary, and even the surgical instruments 

 are made was bronze ; although articles of iron are by no means want- 

 ing among the relics found in those ancient cities. In Transylvania 

 and Hungary, according to Keller, an age of copper instruments inter- 

 vened between that of stone and bronze. 



In estimating the degree in which iron and bronze prevailed in 

 prehistoric ages, we are in some danger of being misled by the great 

 durability of the one metal, and the facility with which the other, or 

 the iron, is decomposed. But if iron be corroded in large quantities 

 by oxidation, it would usually betray itself to the geologist by acting 

 as a cement, and binding together the particles of sand, gravel, mud, and 



* Mr. J. Lubbock's Lecture, Royal Institution, Feb. 27th, 1863. 

 f Sir G. Cornwall Lewis, Astronomy of the Ancients, ch. viii. 

 \ Diodorus, v. 21, 22, and Sir H. James, Note on Block of Tin dredged up in 

 Falmouth Harbor. Royal Institution of Cornwall, 1863. 



