Industrial Biography | Page 9

The first was the Stone period, in which the implements

chiefly used were sticks, bones, stones, and flints. The next was the
Bronze period, distinguished by the introduction and general use of a
metal composed of copper and tin, requiring a comparatively low
degree of temperature to smelt it, and render it capable of being
fashioned into weapons, tools, and implements; to make which,
however, indicated a great advance in experience, sagacity, and skill in
the manipulation of metals. With tools of bronze, to which considerable
hardness could be given, trees were felled, stones hewn, houses and
ships built, and agriculture practised with comparative facility. Last of
all came the Iron period, when the art of smelting and working that
most difficult but widely diffused of the minerals was discovered; from
which point the progress made in all the arts of life has been of the
most remarkable character.
Although Mr. Wright rejects this classification as empirical, because
the periods are not capable of being clearly defined, and all the three
kinds of implements are found to have been in use at or about the same
time,* [footnote... THOMAS WRIGHT, F.S.A., The Celt, The Roman,
and The Saxon, ed. 1861. ...] there is, nevertheless, reason to believe
that it is, on the whole, well founded. It is doubtless true that
implements of stone continued in use long after those of bronze and
iron had been invented, arising most probably from the dearness and
scarcity of articles of metal; but when the art of smelting and working
in iron and steel had sufficiently advanced, the use of stone, and
afterwards of bronze tools and weapons, altogether ceased.
The views of M. Worsaae, and the other Continental antiquarians who
follow his classification, have indeed received remarkable confirmation
of late years, by the discoveries which have been made in the beds of
most of the Swiss lakes.* [footnote... Referred to at length in the
Antiquity of Man, by Sir C. Lyell, who adopts M. Worsaae's
classification. ...] It appears that a subsidence took place in the waters
of the Lake of Zurich in the year 1854, laying bare considerable
portions of its bed. The adjoining proprietors proceeded to enclose the
new land, and began by erecting permanent dykes to prevent the return
of the waters. While carrying on the works, several rows of stakes were
exposed; and on digging down, the labourers turned up a number of
pieces of charred wood, stones blackened by fire, utensils, bones, and
other articles, showing that at some remote period, a number of human

beings had lived over the spot, in dwellings supported by stakes driven
into the bed of the lake.
The discovery having attracted attention, explorations were made at
other places, and it was shortly found that there was scarcely a lake in
Switzerland which did not yield similar evidence of the existence of an
ancient Lacustrine or Lake-dwelling population. Numbers of their tools
and implements were brought to light--stone axes and saws, flint
arrowheads, bone needles, and such like--mixed with the bones of wild
animals slain in the chase; pieces of old boats, portions of twisted
branches, bark, and rough planking, of which their dwellings had been
formed, the latter still bearing the marks of the rude tools by which they
had been laboriously cut. In the most ancient, or lowest series of
deposits, no traces of metal, either of bronze or iron, were discovered;
and it is most probable that these lake-dwellers lived in as primitive a
state as the South Sea islanders discovered by Captain Cook, and that
the huts over the water in which they lived resembled those found in
Papua and Borneo, and the islands of the Salomon group, to this day.
These aboriginal Swiss lake-dwellers seem to have been succeeded by
a race of men using tools, implements, and ornaments of bronze. In
some places the remains of this bronze period directly overlay those of
the stone period, showing the latter to have been the most ancient; but
in others, the village sites are altogether distinct. The articles with
which the metal implements are intermixed, show that considerable
progress had been made in the useful arts. The potter's wheel had been
introduced. Agriculture had begun, and wild animals had given place to
tame ones. The abundance of bronze also shows that commerce must
have existed to a certain extent; for tin, which enters into its
composition, is a comparatively rare metal, and must necessarily have
been imported from other European countries.
The Swiss antiquarians are of opinion that the men of bronze suddenly
invaded and extirpated the men of flint; and that at some still later
period, another stronger and more skilful race, supposed to have been
Celts from Gaul, came armed with iron weapons, to whom the men of
bronze