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 

 enough to suggest to even the most casual observer the 

 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 

 Eoman 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. 



