a date for anything Chinese, it behoves the rest of
the unlearned world to open its mouth and shut its eyes, and thankfully
receive whatever the distinguished Sinologist may send it.

In the seventh century, then, these mercantile axes, made in the
strictest sense to sell and not to use, were stamped with an official
stamp to mark their amount, and became thereby converted into true
coins--that was the root of the 'root of all evil.' Thence the
declension to the 'cash' is easy; the form grew gradually more and more
regular, while the square hole in the centre, once used for the handle,
was retained by conservatism and practical sense as a convenient means
of stringing them together.

So this was the end of the old bronze hatchet, perhaps the most
wonderful civilizing agent ever invented by human ingenuity. Let us
hark back now, and from the opposite side see what was its first
beginning.

'But why,' you ask, 'the most wonderful civilizing agency? What did the
bronze axe ever do for humanity?' Well, nearly everything. I believe I
have really not said too much. We are apt to talk big nowadays about
the steam-engine, and that marvellous electricity which is always going
to do wonders for us all--to-morrow; but I don't know whether either
ever produced so great a revolution in human life, or so completely
metamorphosed human existence, as that simple and commonplace bronze
hatchet.

For, consider that before the days of bronze man knew no weapon or
implement of any sort save the stone axe, or tomahawk, and the
flint-tipped arrow. Consider, that the highest stage of human culture
he had then reached was hardly higher than that of the scalp-hunting
Red Indian or the seal-spearing Esquimaux. Consider, that in his Stone
Age agriculture and grains were almost unknown--the forest uncleared,
the soil untilled, and hunting and fishing the sole or principal human
activities. It was the bronze axe that first enabled man to make
clearings in the woodland on the large scale, and to sow on those
clearings in good big fields the wheat and barley which determined the
first great upward step in the drama of civilization. All these things
depend in ultimate analysis upon that pioneer of culture, the bronze
hatchet.

And how did the first Watt or Edison of metallurgy come to make that
earliest bronze implement? Well, it seems probable that between the
Stone Age and the Bronze Age there intervened everywhere, or nearly
everywhere, a ve