s been shewn by experiment
to be too brittle, and fifteen parts copper to one of tin too soft, for
use. Within these proportions the chief analyses of the ancient bronze
implements range. The exact proportion of ten copper to one of tin, Mr.
Wilson has shewn to be an overstatement. All then that we are warranted
to infer is, that Britain was the chief source of the tin.

This is a great fact in the annals of our early commerce, but not
necessarily of much importance in the natural history of our inventions;
since it by no means follows that because Cornwall supplied tin to such
adventurous merchants as sought to buy it, it therefore discovered the
art of working it.

The chief reason for believing that the art of working in any metal
except gold was as foreign to Britain as the alphabet was to Greece,
rests on a negative fact, of which too little notice has been taken.
Copper is a metal of which England produces plenty. It is a metal, too,
which is the easiest worked of all, except gold and lead. It is the
metal which savage nations, such as some of the American Indians, work
when they work no other; and, lastly, it is a metal of which, in its
unalloyed state, no relics have been found in England. Stone and bone
first; then bronze or copper and tin combined; but no copper alone. I
cannot get over this hiatus--cannot imagine a metallurgic industry
_beginning with the use of alloys_. Such a phenomenon is a plant without
the seed; and, as such, indicates transplantation rather than growth.

This view assists us in our chronology. If the art of working in bronze
be a native and independent development, its antiquity may be of any
amount--going back to 3000 B.C. as easily as to 2000 B.C., and to 2000
B.C. as easily as to 1000 B.C. It may be of any age whatever, provided
only that it be later than the Stone period. But if it be an exotic art,
it must be subsequent to the rise of the Ph[oe]nician commerce. Such I
believe to have been the case. That the Britons were apt learners, and
that they soon made the art their own, is likely. The existence of
bronze and stone moulds for adzes and celts proves this.

The effects of the introduction of metal implements would be two-fold.
It would act on the social state of the occupants of the British Isles,
and act on the physical condition of the soil. The opportunities of
getting stones and bones for the purposes of warfare, would be pretty
equally distributed over the islands, so th