In the Odyssey, when the poet describes the process of tempering iron, we read, "as when a smith dips a great axe or an adze in chill water, for thus men temper iron." [Footnote: Odyssey, IX. 391-393.] He is not using iron to make a sword or spear, but a tool-adze or axe. The poet is perfectly consistent. There are also examples both of bronze axes and, apparently, of bronze knives. Thus, though the woodcutter's or carpenter's axe is of bronze in two passages cited, iron is the usual material of the axe or adze. Again we saw, when Achilles gives a mass of iron as a prize in the games, he does not mean the armourer to fashion it into sword or spear, but says that it will serve the shepherd or ploughman for domestic implements, [Footnote: Leaf, _Iliad_ (1902), XXIII. line 30, Note.] so that the men need not, on an upland farm, go to the city for iron implements. In commenting upon this Mr. Leaf is scarcely at the proper point of view. He says, [Footnote: _Iliad_, XXIII. 835, Note.] "the idea of a state of things when the ploughman and shepherd forge their own tools from a lump of raw iron has a suspicious appearance of a deliberate attempt to represent from the inner consciousness an archaic state of civilisation. In Homeric times the [Greek: chalceus] is already specialised as a worker in metals...." However, Homer does not say that the ploughman and shepherd "forge their own tools." A Homeric chief, far from a town, would have his own smithy, just as the laird of Runraurie (now Urrard) had his smithy at the time of the battle of Killicrankie (1689). Mackay's forces left their _impedimenta_ "at the laird's smithy," says an eye-witness. [Footnote: Napier's _Life_ Of _Dundee_, iii. p. 724.] The idea of a late Homeric poet trying to reconstruct from his fancy a prehistoric state of civilisation is out of the question. Even historical novelists of the eighteenth century A.D. scarcely attempted such an effort. This was the regular state of things in the Highlands during the eighteenth century, when many chiefs, and most of the clans, lived far from any town. But these rural smiths did not make sword-blades, which Prince Charles, as late as 1750, bought on the Continent. The Andrea Ferrara-marked broadsword blades of the clans were of foreign manufacture. The Highland smiths did such rough iron work as was needed for rural purposes. Perhaps the Homeric chief may have sometimes been a craftsman like the heroes of the Sagas, great sword-smiths. Odysseus himself, notably an excellent carpenter, may have been as good a sword-smith, but every hero was not so accomplished. In searching with microscopes for Homeric discrepancies and interpolations, critics are apt to forget the ways of old rural society.