They were probably the result of the want of tin necessary for the manufacture of bronze. Copper by itself would not be very much more useful for cutting purposes than stone, on account of its softness, and therefore is not likely to have superseded stone, which is so much more widely spread, and to the use of which mankind had been accustomed for many centuries. The native copper of Lake Superior has been worked by the Red Indians from an unknown period; and had it offered them a material much better than stone, there would have been an age of Copper in North America. The few implements of that metal which have been discovered do not afford any evidence of this. At the time of the discovery of the New World the peoples of Peru and Mexico used bronze, while the ruder American tribes were in the Neolithic stage of culture. It is therefore improbable that copper should have marked a stage in human progress in Europe, where native copper is so rare, and where the ores would have to be reduced to obtain the metal. The appearance of a definite compound such as bronze implies that it has been introduced into Europe from some other area, in which we may suppose that the ingenuity of man was at work for a long period in finding out, by continual experiments, the properties both of copper and of tin, ultimately combining them together in the proportions which are so generally observed in the implements and weapons of the Bronze age. There is no trace of any such series of experiments having been carried out in Europe.[1] The origin of bronze, and the source from which bronze was
- ↑ General Lane Fox thinks it probable that there was a Copper age in Europe, and accounts for the scarcity of the implements by the hypothesis
