on of bronze implements coincided with the advent of a new
variety of mankind, the question whether the art of alloying and casting
metals was of native or foreign origin, is a verbal one; since it was
native or foreign just as we define the term--native to the stock which
introduced it on the British soil, foreign to the soil itself. But as
soon as we demur to the notion that the earliest Britons were a separate
and peculiar stock, and commit ourselves to the belief that they were
simply Kelts in a ruder condition, the problem presents itself in a
different and more important form. Was the art of making an alloy of tin
and copper self-evolved, or was it an art which foreign commerce
introduced? Was the art of casting such alloys British? It is well to
keep the two questions separate. The preliminary facts in respect to the
history of the bronze metallurgy are as follows:--

1. The peculiar geographical distribution of tin, which of all the
metals of any wide practical utility is found in the fewest localities,
those localities being far apart, _e.g._, Britain and Malacca--

2. The wide extent of country over which bronze implements are found.
Except in Norway and Sweden, where the use of iron seems to have
immediately followed that of stone and bone, they have been found all
over Europe--

3. The narrow limits to the proportions of alloy--nine-tenths copper,
and one-tenth tin--there or thereabouts--in the majority of cases.

4. The considerable amount of uniformity in the shape of even those
implements wherein a considerable variety of form is admissible. Thus
the bronze sword--a point hereafter to be noticed--is almost always
long, leaf-shaped, pointed, and without a handle.

The last three of these facts suggest the notion that bronze metallurgy
originated with a single population; the first, that that population was
British. Yet neither of these inferences is unimpeachable.

The notion that the bronze implements themselves were made in any single
country, and thence diffused elsewhere, has but few upholders; since, in
most of the countries where they have been found, the moulds for making
them have been found also. Hence the doctrine that the raw material--the
mixed metal only--was brought from some single source is the more
important one. Yet chemical investigations have modified even this.[2]
The proportions in question are the best, and they are easily discovered
to be so. Seven parts copper to one of tin ha