By taking advantage of this quality of bronze they were enabled to hammer it, and, after the necessary work with the hammer was finished, they could, by means of gradual cooling, restore the metal to its original hardness. At the present day, cymbals and tom-toms are made exactly in this way. All these considerations will perhaps sufficiently explain to the reader why the use of bronze preceded that of iron among all the European and Asiatic peoples. On this quasi-absence of manufactured copper in the pre-historic monuments of Europe, certain archæologists have relied when propounding the opinion that bronze was brought into Europe by a people coming from the East, a more advanced and civilised people, who had already passed through their _copper age_, that is, had known and made use of pure copper. This people, it is said, violently invaded Europe, and in almost every district took the place of the primitive population; so that, in every country, bronze suddenly succeeded stone for the manufacture of instruments, weapons and implements. By the side of these _savants_, who represent to some extent, in ethnological questions, the partisans of the great geological cataclysms or revolutions of the globe, there are others who would refer the appearance of bronze in Europe to a great extension of commercial relations. They utterly reject the idea of any conquest, of any great invasion having brought with it a complete change in manners, customs, and processes of industrial skill. In their opinion, it was commerce which first brought bronze from the East and introduced it to the men of the West. This is the view of Sir Cornewall Lewis, the archæologist and statesman, and also of Prof. Nilsson, who attributes to the Phoenicians the importation of bronze into Europe. Without attaining any great result, Nilsson has taken much trouble in supporting this idea by acceptable proofs. We are called upon to agree with the Danish archæologist in admitting that the Phoenicians, that is, the inhabitants of Tyre and Sidon went _with their ships_ to procure tin from Great Britain, in order to make an alloy with it in their own country, which alloy they subsequently imported into Europe.