stand against the prows
of mail which were supposed to threaten them, than the sticks and
stones of the ancient tribes were able to resist the men armed with
weapons of bronze or steel. What Solon said to Croesus, when the
latter was displaying his great treasures of gold, still holds
true:--"If another comes that hath better iron than you, he will be
master of all that gold." So, when an alchemist waited upon the Duke
of Brunswick during the Seven Years' War, and offered to communicate
the secret of converting iron into gold, the Duke replied:--"By no
means: I want all the iron I can find to resist my enemies: as for
gold, I get it from England." Thus the strength and wealth of nations
depend upon coal and iron, not forgetting Men, far more than upon gold.

Thanks to our Armstrongs and Whitworths, our Browns and our Smiths, the
iron defences of England, manned by our soldiers and our sailors,
furnish the assurance of continued security for our gold and our
wealth, and, what is infinitely more precious, for our industry and our
liberty.

[1] "Mr. John Buchanan, a zealous antiquary, writing in 1855, informs
us that in the course of the eight years preceding that date, no less
than seventeen canoes had been dug out of this estuarine silt [of the
valley of the Clyde], and that he had personally inspected a large
number of them before they were exhumed. Five of them lay buried in
silt under the streets of Glasgow, one in a vertical position with the
prow uppermost, as if it had sunk in a storm.... Almost every one of
these ancient boats was formed out of a single oak-stem, hollowed out
by blunt tools, probably stone axes, aided by the action of fire; a few
were cut beautifully smooth, evidently with metallic tools. Hence a
gradation could be traced from a pattern of extreme rudeness to one
showing great mechanical ingenuity.... In one of the canoes a
beautifully polished celt or axe of greenstone was found; in the bottom
of another a plug of cork, which, as Mr. Geikie remarks, 'could only
have come from the latitudes of Spain, Southern France, or
Italy.'"--Sir C. LYELL, Antiquity of Man, 48-9.

[2] THOMAS WRIGHT, F.S.A., The Celt, The Roman, and The Saxon, ed. 1861.

[3] Referred to at length in the Antiquity of Man, by Sir C. Lyell, who
adopts M. Worsaae's classification.

[4] Mr. Mushet, however, observes that "the general use of hardened
copper by the ancients for edge-tools and warlike instruments, doe