made to the shape of the stone implements. Possibly they first found native copper and hammered it into shape.[1] Later—we will not venture upon figures—men had found out how to get copper from its ore. Perhaps, as Lord Avebury suggested, they discovered the secret of smelting by the chance putting of lumps of copper ore among the ordinary stones with which they built the fire pits they used for cooking. In China, Hungary, Cornwall, and elsewhere copper ore and tinstone occur in the same veins; it is a very common association, and so, rather through dirtiness than skill, the ancient smelters, it may be, hit upon the harder and better bronze, which is an alloy of copper and tin.[2] Bronze is not only harder than copper, but the mixture of tin and copper is more fusible and easier to reduce. The so-called "pure-copper" implements usually contain a small proportion of tin, and there are no tin implements known, nor very much evidence to show that early men knew of tin as a separate metal.[3][4] The plant of a prehistoric copper smelter has been found in Spain, and the material of bronze foundries in various localities. The method of smelting revealed by these finds carries out Lord Avebury's suggestion. In India, where zinc and copper ore occur together, brass (which is an alloy of the two metals) was similarly hit upon.
So slight was the change in fashions and methods produced by the appearance of bronze, that for a long time such bronze axes and so forth as were made were cast in moulds to the shape of the stone implements they were superseding.
Finally, perhaps as early as 3000 years ago in Europe, and even
- ↑ Native copper is still found to-day in Italy, Hungary, Cornwall, and many other places.
- ↑ This view of the origin of bronze is that of Dr. Gowland, The Metals in Antiquity (Huxley Lecture, 1912). But Lord Avebury quotes the verbal opinion of the late Lord Swansea against this view, and sets it aside without further argument.
- ↑ Ridgeway (Early Age of Greece) says a lump of tin has been found in the Swiss pile-dwelling deposits.
- ↑ Tin was known as a foreign import in Egypt under the XVIIIth Dynasty; there is (rare) Mycenæan tin, and there are (probably later, but not clearly dated) tin objects in the Caucasus. But it is very difficult to distinguish tin from antimony. There is a good deal of Cyprus bronze which contains antimony; a good deal which seems to be tin is antimony—the ancients trying to get tin, but actually getting antimony and thinking it was tin. — J. L. M.
