Dr. Pearson's Observations 
396 
from the structure of the sandals on the feet ; and yet the skin, 
with hair upon it, was pliable and soft like doe-skin leather. 
The workmen who found several of the articles which are 
the subject of this paper, and at the same time many other 
arms and utensils of our Roman, Saxon, and Danish ancestors, 
universally agreed, that most of them lay at the bottom of the 
river, on the hard soil, and below all the mud. From which 
observation it may be inferred, that our Saxon ancestors kept 
the river in much better condition than their successors have 
subsequently done ; and indeed this conclusion receives a great 
degree of credit from the arms which, in the year 1788, were 
brought up by an eel-spear near Kirksted Wath ; for in that 
place, and in some few others, the old bottom lay so low, that 
those who cleaned the river had not occasion to sink down to 
it, although they removed as thick a body of mud there as 
elsewhere. 
The instruments of which I shall here give an account, 
were evidently made of what are commonly called brass, and 
iron. The brass instruments, as I shall show, were allays of 
copper by tin ; and the supposed iron implements were found 
to be steel. 
It will be proper in this place to observe, that brass is a term 
commonly used to denote any metallic composition the prin- 
cipal ingredient of which is copper ; but the most accurate 
writers in chemistry use the term brass, with more precision, 
to denote only the compound of copper and zinc ; and there- 
fore I shall employ it in this latter sense. 
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