purposes.
It is for this reason that many tombs contain confused remains of
utensils of bronze and weapons of iron.

=Iron Weapons.=--These arms are axes, swords, daggers, and bucklers.
They are ordinarily found by the side of a skeleton in a coffin of
stone or wood, for warriors had their arms buried with them. But they
are found also scattered on ancient battle-fields or lost at the
bottom of a marsh which later became a turf-pit. There were found in a
turf-pit in Schleswig in one day 100 swords, 500 lances, 30 axes, 460
daggers, 80 knives, 40 stilettos--and all of iron. Not far from there
in the bed of an ancient lake was discovered a great boat 66 feet
long, fully equipped with axes, swords, lances, and knives.

It is impossible to enumerate the iron implements thus found. They
have not been so well preserved as the bronze, as iron is rapidly
eaten away by rust. At the first glance, therefore, they appear the
older, but in reality are more recent.

=Epoch of the Iron Age.=--The inhabitants of northern Europe knew iron
before the coming of the Romans, the first century before Christ. In
an old cemetery near the salt mines of Hallstadt in Austria they have
opened 980 tombs filled with instruments of iron and bronze without
finding a single piece of Roman money. But the Iron Age continued
under the Romans. Almost always iron objects are found accompanied by
ornaments of gold and silver, by Roman pottery, funeral urns,
inscriptions, and Roman coins bearing the effigy of the emperor. The
warriors whom we find lying near their sword and their buckler lived
for the most part in a period quite close to ours, many under the
Merovingians, some even at the time of Charlemagne. The Iron Age is no
longer a prehistoric age.

CONCLUSIONS

=How the Four Ages are to be Conceived.=--The inhabitants of one and
the same country have successively made use of rough stone, polished
stone, bronze, and iron. But all countries have not lived in the same
age at the same time. Iron was employed by the Egyptians while yet the
Greeks were in their bronze age and the barbarians of Denmark were
using stone. The conclusion of the polished stone age in America came
only with the arrival of Europeans. In our own time the savages of
Australia are still in the rough stone age. In their settlements may
be found only implements of bone and stone similar to those used by
the cave-men. The four ages, therefore, do not mark periods in the
life of