ree thousand years before the Christian era,
when the Aryans overspread Europe. After all the controversy about the
Aryans it seems clear that a powerful race, representing the ancestors
of most of the actual peoples of Europe and speaking the dialects which
have been modified into the related languages of the Greeks, Romans,
Germans, Celts, Lithuanians, etc., imposed its speech on nearly the
whole of the continent. Only in the Basques and Picts do we seem to find
some remnants of the earlier non-Aryan tongues. But whether these Aryans
really came from Asia, as it used to be thought, or developed in the
east of Europe, is uncertain. We seem justified in thinking that a very
robust race had been growing in numbers and power during the Neolithic
Age, somewhere in the region of South-east Europe and Southwest Asia,
and that a few thousand years before the Christian Era one branch of
it descended upon India, another upon the Persian region, and another
overspread Europe. We will return to the point later. Instead of being
the bearers of a higher civilisation, these primitive Aryans seem to
have been lower in culture than the peoples on whom they fell.

The Neolithic Age had meantime passed into the Age of Metal. Copper was
probably the first metal to be used. It is easily worked, and is found
in nature. But the few copper implements we possess do not suggest a
"Copper Age" of any length or extent. It was soon found, apparently,
that an admixture of tin hardened the copper, and the Bronze Age
followed. The use of bronze was known in Egypt about 4800 B.C. (Flinders
Petrie), but little used until about 2000 B.C. By that time (or a few
centuries later) it had spread as far as Scandinavia and Britain. The
region of invention is not known, but we have large numbers of beautiful
specimens of bronze work--including brooches and hair-pins--in all parts
of Europe. Finally, about the thirteenth century B.C., we find the first
traces of the use of iron. The first great centre for the making of iron
weapons seems to have been Hallstatt, in the Austrian Alps, whence it
spread slowly over Europe, reaching Scandinavia and Britain between
500 and 300 B.C. But the story of man had long before this entered the
historical period, to which we now turn.

CHAPTER XXI. EVOLUTION IN HISTORY

In the preceding chapters I have endeavoured to show how, without
invoking any "definitely directed variations," which we seem to have
little chance of u