very early date, for the Phoenicians of Tyre and Sidon were visiting this country to trade for it between 1500 and 1200 B.C. It is recorded that they carried on the tin trade from Cadiz, and it is possible that they founded this port as a half-way house between Cornwall and their own country. They may have brought finished implements of bronze to barter for the ores, and it is AMBER NECKLACE possible that it was they who imparted the secret of the alloy, or themselves set up smelting centres in Britain and on the continent of Europe. At any rate, as they came in sea-going ships, the timbers of which would be fastened with copper bolts, they must have possessed some knowledge of the working of metals. Spain, besides forming a link between the Mediterranean and North-west Europe, would attract their notice owing to her wealth of silver, tin, and copper, and probably the oldest route of communication between the Near East and the West led by the islands of the Western Mediterranean through Spain, Portugal, and Western France to the British Isles and Northern Europe. Ireland was famous in the ancient world for gold, which she bartered for, among other things, amber from Jutland and from the east coast of England. The abundance of amber, in great request for ornaments, on the west coast of Denmark and on the south shores of the Baltic, brought into existence two great trade routes through Germany to the Mediterranean-one from the North Sea by the Elbe, Inn, and Adige to the head of the Adriatic near Venice; the other from Dantzig by the Vistula, Oder, and March to the Danube, and thence to the Gulf of Trieste. The Rhône valley formed part of another highway of trade between the Mediterranean countries and Northwest Europe. Countries adjacent to these and other trade routes would be the first to become acquainted with the working of bronze, and later on of iron. Such regions as Scandinavia, then the end of the known world, and Eastern Hungary, lying east of the great amber route from the Baltic to the Adriatic, would be the latest to hear of new inventions and to adopt new ways of life, and as these countries were late in entering upon their Bronze Age they were even more markedly slow to adopt iron in place of bronze, with the result that their bronze remains are unmatched for variety and beauty of workmanship in the more progressive regions that passed quickly to the use of iron. It has been said that the Age of Stone overlapped that of Bronze, and that then it was only gradually that the use of metal superseded that of stone. Yet, though there is no reason to believe that the art of metalworking was introduced into this country by a conquering race, we have evidence that a population different from the users of polished stone was settled here during the Age of Bronze. BRONZE SWORDS In the first place, they constructed their graves after a different pattern. The barrows of the later Stone Age are very long in comparison with their breadth; the length runs east and west, and the east end is broader and higher than the other. The barrows of the Bronze Age, on the other hand, are circular and more or less conical; moreover, they contain human remains of a type not found in the long barrows. In long barrows we find the skeletons of longheaded men; in the round barrows we find long-headed men and also men of a new type, with round, or rather short skulls. It should be explained that a skull is called long if its width is not more than 75 per cent. of the length, and short if the width exceeds 80 per cent. The difference in proportion of the skull is only one, however, of many divergences between the two types. For example, the long-headed men appear to have had an average height of 5 feet 5 inches. The average of the short-headed men was three inches more than this, and they were stronger in proportion. They suggest a race of successful invaders, and the presence of many skulls of intermediate proportions in the round barrows seems to indicate that they intermarried with the earlier inhabitants of the country and produced a race of mixed type. The earliest inhabitants of these islands whose name has come down to us were the Picts, who were probably BROAD OR BRACHYCEPHALIO SKULL. TOP VIEW LONG OR DOLICHOCEPHALIC the people whom Cæsar mentions as claiming descent from the first inhabitants. They would appear to be the long-headed people of the long barrows. Spreading from some centre probably in South-east Europe came wave after wave of migration, bringing hordes of fair-haired, short-headed invaders upon the earlier inhabitants of the Mediterranean peninsulas, Germany, France, and Britain. An intermixture of races took place and the migrations continued. In Britain the new-comers were a Keltic-speaking race, the Gaels, probably from the nearest parts of the Continent. They drove the Picts into the northern part of the island, from which in later times they made incursions into Romanized Britain, but with the remnant of the Pictish race in the southern part they seem to have inter mingled freely, producing the race of mixed type whose remains are found in the round barrows. The Gaels had occupied most of the country south of the Firths of Forth and Clyde when a fresh wave of migration brought into Britain the Brythons, a race speaking a dialect of the Keltic tongue. These in vaders drove them north and west BRONZE PINS The relics of this age that we possess prove that with the discovery of the art of metal-working a number of new wants arose and were satisfied by the ingenuity of man. Human life was losing its first bare simplicity as men advanced from the hunting stage of existence to the beginnings of agriculture and settled life. The thick forests in Europe and the British Isles, through the tangled foot-paths of which hunters tracked the wild beasts which were their food, gradually became dotted with settlements trading in a primitive way with one another. We cannot say much about the actual dwellings of the people except that they must have |