of a shaft, made by hammering out the base
flat, and then turning over the edges so as to enclose the wood between
them, like a modern hoe-handle. In Wisconsin alone more than a hundred
of such copper axes, spear-heads, and knives have been unearthed by
antiquaries and duly recorded.

All these weapons, however, are simply hammered, not cast or melted.
The Red Indian hadn't yet reached the stage of making a mould when De
Champlain and his _voyageurs_ came down upon Canada and interrupted
this interesting experiment in industrial development by springing the
seventeenth century upon the unsophisticated red man at one fell blow,
with all its inherited wealth of European science. Nevertheless, the
Indians must have known that fire melted copper; for the heat of the
altars was great enough, say Squier and Davis, to fuse the implements
and ornaments laid upon them in sacrificial rites; and so the fact of
its fusibility could hardly have escaped them. A people who had
advanced so far on the road towards the invention of casting could
hardly have been prevented from taking the final step, save by the
sudden intervention of some social cataclysm like the European invasion
of Eastern America. And how awful a calamity that was for the Indians
themselves we at this day can hardly even realize.

In some similar way, no doubt, the Asiatic people who first invented
bronze must have learned the fact of the fusibility of metals, and have
applied it in time, at first, perhaps, by accident, to the manufacture
of that hard alloy. I say Asiatic, because there seems good reason to
believe that Asia was the original home of the nascent bronze industry.
For a Bronze Age almost necessarily implies a brief preceding age of
copper; and there is no proof of pure copper implements ever having
been largely used in Europe, while there is ample proof of their having
been used to a very considerable extent in Asia. Hence we may
reasonably infer that the art of bronze-making was developed in Asia by
a copper-using people, and that when metallurgy was first introduced
into Europe the method of mixing the copper with tin had already been
perfected. The abundance of tin in the south-eastern islands of Asia
renders this view probable; while in Europe there are no tin mines
worth mentioning, except in the remotest part of a remote outlying
island--to wit, in Cornwall.

Be this as it may, the earliest and simplest forms of bronze axe with
which we are acq