145, 207, 208, 256. _Evans, Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, vol xxx. p, 214.] Why, then, did the late poetic interpolators, who knew that the spears and swords of the old warriors were of bronze, and who describe them as of bronze, not know that their knives and axes were also of bronze? Why did they describe the old knives and axes as of iron, while Hesiod knew, and could have told them--did tell them, in fact--that they were of bronze? Clearly the theory that Homeric poets were archaeological precisians is impossible. They describe arms as of bronze, tools usually as of iron, because they see them to be such in practice. The poems, in fact, depict a very extraordinary condition of affairs, such as no poets could invent and adhere to with uniformity. We are accustomed in archaeology to seeing the bronze sword pass by a gradual transition into the iron sword; but, in Homer, people with abundance of iron never, in any one specified case, use iron sword blades or spears. The greatest chiefs, men said to be rich in gold and iron, always use swords and spears of _bronze_ in _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_. The usual process of transition from bronze to iron swords, in a prehistoric European age, is traced by Mr. Ridgeway at Hallstatt, "in the heart of the Austrian Alps," where a thousand old graves have been explored. The swords pass from bronze to iron with bronze hilts, and, finally, are wholly of iron. Weapons of bronze are fitted with iron edges. Axes of iron were much more common than axes of bronze. [Footnote: _Early Age of Greece_, i. 413-416.] The axes were fashioned in the old shapes of the age of bronze, were not of the _bipennis_ Mycenaean model--the double axe--nor of the shape of the letter D, very thick, with two round apertures in the blade, like the bronze axe of Vaphio. [Footnote: Monro, Odyssey, vol. ii. 176.] Probably the axes through which Odysseus shot an arrow were of this kind, as Mr. Monro, and, much earlier, Mr. Butcher and I have argued. [Footnote: _Ibid_. (1901), vol. ii. Book XIX. line 572. Note. Butcher and Lang, Odyssey, Appendix (1891).]