ange. How
nice to save yourself all that long trouble of chipping and polishing,
with ceaseless toil, in favour of a stone which you could melt at one
go and pour while hot into a ready-made mould! It must have looked, by
comparison, like weapon-making by magic; for properly to cut and polish
a stone axe is the work of weeks and weeks of elbow-grease. Yet here,
in a moment, a better hatchet could be turned out all finished! But the
implied effects lay deeper far than the neolithic hunter could ever
have imagined. The bronze axe was the beginning of civilization; it
brought the steam-engine, the telephone, woman's rights, and the county
councillor directly in its train. With the eye of faith, had he only
possessed that useful optical organ, the Stone Age artizan might
doubtless have beheld Pears' soap and the deceased wife's sister
looming dimly in the remote future. Till that moment human life had
been almost stationary: thenceforth, it proceeded by leaps and bounds,
like a kangaroo society, on its upward path towards triumphant
democracy and the penny post. The nineteenth century and all its wiles
hung by a thread upon the success of his melting pot.

Indeed, the whole history of human civilization has been one of a
constantly accelerated progress. The Older Stone Age, when men knew
only how to chip flint implements, but hadn't yet invented the art of
grinding and polishing them, was one of immense and incalculable
duration, to be reckoned perhaps by tens of thousands of years--some
bold chronologists would even suggest by hundreds of thousands.
Improvement there was, to be sure, during all that long epoch of slow
development; but it was improvement at a snail's pace. The very rude
chipped axes of the naked drift age give way after thousands and
thousands of years to the shapelier chipped lances, javelins, and
arrowheads of the skin-clad cavemen. M. Gabriel de Mortillet, indeed,
most indefatigable of theorists, has even pointed out four stages of
culture, marked by four different types of weapons, into which he
subdivides the Older Stone Age. Yet vast epochs elapsed before some
prehistoric Stephenson or dusky Morse first, half by accident, smote
out the idea of grinding his tomahawk smooth to a sharp cutting edge,
instead of merely chipping it sharp, and so initiated the Neolithic
Period. This Neolithic Period itself, again, was immensely long as
compared with the Bronze Age which followed, though short by comparison