covered the art of combining them, and yet in Europe the remains of no such age have been found. Sir John Lubbock says ("Prehistoric Times," p. 59), "The absence of implements made either of copper or tin seems to me to indicate that the art of making bronze was introduced into, not invented in, Europe." The absence of articles of copper is especially marked; nearly all the European specimens of copper implements have been found in Ireland; and yet out of twelve hundred and eighty-three articles of the Bronze Age, in the great museum at Dublin, only thirty celts and one sword-blade are said to be made of pure copper; and even as to some of these there seems to be a question.
Where on the face of the earth are we to find a Copper Age? Is it in the barbaric depths of that Asia out of whose uncivilized tribes all civilization is said to have issued? By no means. Again we are compelled to turn to the West. In America, from Bolivia to Lake Superior, we find everywhere the traces of a long-enduring Copper Age; bronze existed, it is true, in Mexico, but it held the same relation to the copper as the copper held to the bronze in Europe—it was the exception as against the rule. And among the Chippeways of the shores of Lake Superior, and among them alone, we find any traditions of the origin of the manufacture of copper implements; and on the shores of that lake we find pure copper, out of which the first metal tools were probably hammered before man had learned to reduce the ore or run the metal into moulds. And on the shores of this same American lake we find the ancient mines from which some people, thousands of years ago, derived their supplies of copper.
Sir W. R. Wilde says, "It is remarkable that so few antique copper implements have been found (in Europe), although a knowledge of that metal must have been the preliminary stage in the manufacture of bronze." He thinks that this may be accounted for by supposing that "but a short time elapsed between the knowledge of smelting and casting copper ore
