Science in Arcady

To the neolithic hunter, herdsman, and villager this progress from the stone to the metal axe probably seemed at first a mere substitution of an easier for a more difficult material. He little knew whither his discovery tended. It was pure human laziness that urged the change. 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 with the Palæolithic 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 primæval 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 the flanged axes, with projecting ledges on either side; and then the palstaves with loops and ribs, each marking some new improvement in the character of the weapon, which the inventor would no doubt have patented but for the unfortunate fact that patents were as yet wholly unknown to Bronze Age humanity. Later still come the socketed hatchets of many patterns, with endless ingenious little devices for securing some small advantage to the special manufacturer. I can fancy the Bronze Age smith showing them off with pride to his interested customers: 'These are our own patterns—the newest thing out in bronze axes; observe the advantage you gain from the ribs and pellets, and the peculiar character which the octagonal socket gives to the hafting!' Indeed, in this single department of bronze celts alone, Mr. Evans in his great monumental work figures over a hundred and eighty distinct specimens (out of thousands known), each one presenting some well-marked advance in type upon its predecessor. There is almost a Yankee ingenuity of design in many of the dodges thus registered for our inspection.

Many of the celts, I may add, are most beautifully decorated with geometrical patterns, some of which belong to a very high order of ornamental art. This is still more the case with the daggers, swords, and defensive armour, often intended for the use of great chieftains, and executed with an amount of taste and feeling long since dead among the degenerate workmen of our iron age.

But the indirect effects of the introduction of metal working were far more interesting and important in their way than the direct effects. With bronze began the great age of agriculture, of commerce, and of navigation.

Of agriculture first, because the bronze hatchet enabled men to make such openings in the forest as neolithic man had never ever dreamed of. For the first time in the history of our race, whole tracts of country at once began to be cleared and cultivated. Stone Age tillage was the tillage of tiny plots in the forest's depths; Bronze Age tillage was the tillage of fields and wide open spaces in the champaign country. The Stone Age knew no specials implements of agriculture as such; its tomahawk was indiscriminately applied to all purposes alike of war or gardening. You scalped your enemy with it, or you cut up your dinner, or you dug your field, or you planted your seed-corn, according as taste or circumstances directed. But while the Bronze Age men had axes to hew down the wood, they had also sickles and reaping-hooks to cut their crops, and a sort of hoe or scraper to till the soil with. Specialisation reached a very high pitch. All the remains of the Bronze Age show us an agricultural people by no means idyllic in their habits to be sure, and not all disposed to join the Peace Preservation Society, but cultivating large stretches of wheat or barley, grinding their meal in regular mills, and possessed of implements of considerable diversity, some of which I shall proceed to notice later.

The evidences of commerce and of navigation are equally obvious. Bronze itself consists of tin and copper: and there are only two parts of the world from which tin in any large quantities can be procured—namely, Cornwall and the Malay Archipelago. The very existence of bronze, therefore, necessarily implies the existence of a sea-going trade in tin, for which some corresponding benefits must of course have been offered by the early purchaser. As a matter of fact, we know with some probability that it was Cornish tin which first tempted the Phoenicians out of the inland sea, past the Pillars of Hercules, to brave the terrors of the open Atlantic. Long before the days of such advanced navigation, however, the Cornish tin was transported by land across the whole breadth of Southern Britain and shipped for the Continent from the Isle of Thanet. A very old trackway runs along the crest of the Downs from the West Country to Kent, known now as the Pilgrim's Way, because it was followed in far later times by mediæval wayfarers from Somerset and Dorset to the shrine of St. Thomas à Becket at Canterbury. But Mr. Charles Elton has shown conclusively that the Pilgrim's Way is many centuries more ancient than the martyr of King Henry's epoch, and that it was used in the Bronze Age for the transport of tin from the mines in Cornwall to the port of Sandwich. To this day antique ingots of the valuable metal are often dug up in hoards or finds along the line of the ancient track. They were evidently buried there in fear and trembling, long ages since, in what Indian voyageurs still call a cache, by caravans hurriedly surprised by the enemy; and owing to the unfortunate accident of the possessors all getting killed off in the ensuing fray, the ingots have been left undisturbed for centuries for the benefit of antiquaries at the present time. 'It's an ill wind that blows nobody good.' Probably the inhabitants of Herculaneum and Pompeii had very little notion what valuable relics their bodies and houses would prove in the end for curious posterity.

The converse evidence of a return trade in other goods is no less striking. Not only are articles in amber found in Bronze Age tombs all over Europe (though the gum itself belongs to the Baltic and the North Sea alone), but also gold objects of southern workmanship occur in British barrows; while sometimes even ivory from Africa is noticed in the inlaid handles of some Welsh or Brigantian chieftain's sword. Glass beads were likewise imported into Britain, as were also ornaments of Egyptian porcelain. In fact, the Bronze Age clearly marks for us the period when trade routes extended in every direction from the Mediterranean, north and south, and when the world began to be commercially solidified by a primitive theory of foreign exchange. It is a little odd that the basis of all this traffic was tin, and that we still use the name of that same metal as a brief equivalent for coin in general: but persons of serious economical or philological intelligence are particularly requested not to enter into grave correspondence with the author of this paper on any possible levity which they may detect lurking in this innocent remark.

Some small idea of the rapid advance in civilization which marked the Bronze Age may perhaps be formed from a brief enumeration of the principal classes of remains which have come down to us intact from that first epoch of metal. Besides all the various celts, hatchets, and adzes, whose name is legion, and whose patterns are manifold, many other tools or implements occur abundantly in the barrows or caches. Chisels, either plain, tanged, with lugs, or socketed; gouges, hammers, anvils, and tongs; punches, awls, drills, and prickers; tweezers, needles, fish-hooks, and weights; all these are found by dozens in endless variety of design. Knives are common, and the vanity of Bronze Age man made him even put up without a murmur with the pangs of shaving with a bronze razor. Daggers and rapiers naturally abound, many of them of rare and beautiful workmanship. Halberds turn up less frequently, but swords are abundant, and are sometimes tastefully decorated with gold or ivory. Even the scabbards sometimes survive, while the shields, adorned with concentric rings or with knobs and bosses, would put to shame the rank and file of cheap modern metal work. Nay, the very trumpets which sounded the onset often lie buried by the warrior's side, and the bells which adorned his horse's neck bring back to us vividly the Homeric pictures of Bronze Age warfare.

The private life of Bronze Age man and his correlative wife is illustrated for us by another great group of more strictly personal relics. There are pins simple and pins of the infantile safety-pin order: there are brooches which might be worn by modern ladies, and ear-rings so huge that even modern ladies would in all probability object to wearing them, unless, indeed, a princess or an actress made them the fashion. The torques, or necklets, are among the best known male decorations, and are still famous in Ireland, where Malachi (whoever he may have been) wore the collar of gold which he tore from the proud invader. Many of the bracelets are extremely beautiful; but, strange to say, as if on purpose to spite the common prejudice about the degeneracy of modern man, they are all so small in girth as to betoken a race with arms and legs hardly any bigger than the Finns or Laplanders. Of the clasps, buttons, and buckles I will say nothing here. I have enumerated enough to suggest to even the most casual observer the vastness of the revolution which the Bronze Age wrought in the mode of life and the civilisation of ancient man.

Bronze found our early ancestor, in fact, a half-developed savage: it left him a semi-civilized Homeric Greek. It came in upon a world of skin-clad hunters and fishers: it went out upon a world of Phoenician navigators, Egyptian architects, Achæan poets, and Roman soldiers. And all this wide difference was wrought in a period of some eight or ten centuries at the outside, almost entirely by the advent of the simple bronze axe.