can assume that these objects are actually native productions, we here have a decided proof that its inhabitants in the bronze-period were in possession of a certain degree of civilization. A rude people, who led a savage and warlike life, without possessing either a knowledge or a love of the arts of peace, could scarcely have possessed either mind or energy to produce works which often display both taste and skill of a striking kind.
That our bronze antiquities were brought by the Romans, who by their conquests in Gaul and Britain during the first centuries after the birth of Christ occasioned a complete revolution in the civilization of the north-west of Europe, is altogether incredible. It is true that there occur in Italy a number of bronze implements and weapons which are somewhat similar to our own, as for instance paalstabs, celts and spear-heads, but as these bronzes want the peculiar ornaments above described, they prove nothing more than that certain implements and weapons had the same form among different nations. It is besides a settled point that the Romans when they made war in Gaul and in Britain, had long been in possession of iron, and made use of weapons which were of a totally different form from the bronze weapons found in Denmark. Nor in all probability have these bronzes reached us from Greece, although both with regard to their form and ornaments, particularly the spiral ornaments, a greater similarity appears to exist between those which occur in the North, and those found in the most ancient tombs of Greece. For independently of the fact that the latter have hitherto occurred but seldom, so that our knowledge of them is extremely imperfect, they belong to so very remote a period, 1000 or 1400 years before the birth of Christ, that we can by no means be justified in supposing that any active intercourse then existed between countries so remote from each other. If on the other hand we reflect that the bronzes here described with their peculiar spiral ornaments occur within certain limits of the North, it certainly
