2. The wide extent of country over which bronze implements are found. Except in Norway and Sweden, where the use of iron seems to have immediately followed that of stone and bone, they have been found all over Europe—
3. The narrow limits to the proportions of alloy—nine-tenths copper, and one-tenth tin—there or thereabouts—in the majority of cases.
4. The considerable amount of uniformity in the shape of even those implements wherein a considerable variety of form is admissible. Thus the bronze sword—a point hereafter to be noticed—is[32] almost always long, leaf-shaped, pointed, and without a handle.
The last three of these facts suggest the notion that bronze metallurgy originated with a single population; the first, that that population was British. Yet neither of these inferences is unimpeachable.
The notion that the bronze implements themselves were made in any single country, and thence diffused elsewhere, has but few upholders; since, in most of the countries where they have been found, the moulds for making them have been found also. Hence the doctrine that the raw material—the mixed metal only—was brought from some single source is the more important one. Yet chemical investigations have modified even this.[2] The proportions in question are the best, and they are easily discovered to be so. Seven parts copper to one of tin has been shewn by experiment to be too brittle, and fifteen parts copper to one of tin too soft, for use. Within these proportions the chief analyses of the ancient bronze implements range. The exact proportion of ten copper to one of tin, Mr. Wilson has shewn to be an overstatement. All then that we are warranted to infer is, that Britain was the chief source of the tin.
This is a great fact in the annals of our early commerce, but not necessarily of much importance in the natural history of our inventions; since it by no means follows that because Cornwall supplied tin to such adventurous merchants as sought to buy it, it therefore discovered the art of working it.
The chief reason for believing that the art of working in any metal except gold was as foreign to Britain as the alphabet was to Greece, rests on a negative fact, of which too little notice has been taken. Copper is a metal of which England produces plenty. It is a metal, too, which is the easiest worked of all, except gold and lead. It is the metal which savage nations, such as some of the American Indians, work when they work no other; and, lastly, it is a metal of which, in its unalloyed state, no relics have been found in England. Stone and bone first; then bronze or copper and tin combined; but no copper alone. I cannot get over this hiatus—cannot imagine a metallurgic industry beginning with the use of alloys. Such a phenomenon is a plant without the seed; and, as such, indicates transplantation rather than growth.
This view assists us in our chronology. If the art of working in bronze be a native and independent development, its antiquity may be of any amount—going back to 3000 B.C. as easily as to[34] 2000 B.C., and to 2000 B.C. as easily as to 1000 B.C. It may be of any age whatever, provided only that it be later than the Stone period. But if it be an exotic art, it must be subsequent to the rise of the Phœnician commerce. Such I believe to have been the case. That the Britons were apt learners, and that they soon made the art their own, is likely. The existence of bronze and stone moulds for adzes and celts proves this.
The effects of the introduction of metal implements would be two-fold. It would act on the social state of the occupants of the British Isles, and act on the physical condition of the soil. The opportunities of getting stones and bones for the purposes of warfare, would be pretty equally distributed over the islands, so that the means of attack and defence would be pretty equal throughout; but the use of bronze would give a vast preponderance of power to certain districts, Cornwall, Wales, and the copper countries. The vast forests, too, upon which stone hatchets would have but little effect, would be more easily cleared, and their denizens would be more successfully hunted.