with the Palaeolithic epoch which preceded it. Then the Bronze Age saw
enormous changes come faster and faster, till the use of iron still
further accelerated the rate of progress. For each new improvement
becomes, in turn, the parent of yet newer triumphs, so that at last, as
in the present day, a single century sees vaster changes in the world
of man than whole ages before it have done in far longer intervals.

But the invention of bronze, or, in other words, the introduction of
hard metal, was really perhaps the very greatest epoch of all, the most
distinct turning-point in the whole history of humanity. True, some
beginnings of civilisation were already found in the Newer Stone Age.
Man did not then live by slaughter alone. Hand-made pottery and rude
tissues of flax are found in neolithic lake dwellings in Switzerland.
Agriculture was already practised in a feeble way on small open
clearings, cautiously cleaved with fire or hewn with the tomahawk in
the native forests. The cow, the sheep, and the goat were more or less
domesticated, though the horse was yet riderless; and the pastoral had
therefore, to some extent, superseded the pure hunting stage. But what
inroad could the stone hatchet make unaided upon the virgin forests of
those remote days? The neolithic clearing must have been a mere stray
oasis in a desert of woodland, like the villages of the New Guinea
savages at the present day, lying few and far between among vast
stretches of primaeval forest.

With the advent of bronze, everything was different; and the difference
showed itself with extraordinary rapidity. One may compare the
revolution effected by bronze in the early world, indeed, with the
revolution effected by railways in our own time; only the neolithic
world had been so very simple a one that the change was perhaps even
more marvellous in its suddenness and its comprehensiveness. Metal
itself implied metal-working; and metal-working brought about, not only
the arts of smelting and casting, but also endless incidental arts of
design and decoration. The bronze hatchets, for example, to take our
typical implement, begin by being mere copies of the stone originals;
but, as time goes on, they acquire rapidly innumerable improvements.
First, metal is economized in the upper part which fits into the
handle, while the lower or cutting edge is widened out sideways, so as
to form an elegant and gracefully curved outline for the whole
implement. Next come