From our greater acquaintance with the working of iron than with that of bronze, there seems to us a sort of natural connection between the anvil, hammer, and tongs. It must, however, be borne in mind that bronze is a metal which instead of being, like iron, tough and ductile, becomes “short” and fragile when heated, so that all the hammering to which the tools and weapons of bronze were subjected in order to planish their faces, or to draw out and harden their edges, was probably administered to them when cold. At least one pair of bronze tongs has, however, been found, which is shown in Fig. 219. This instrument was discovered, with numerous other antiquities, in the cave at Heathery Burn,[661] near Stanhope in Weardale, Durham, and is now in the collection of Canon Greenwell. As half of a mould for socketed celts and some waste runners of bronze were found, it is evident that the practice of casting bronze was carried on in the cave, and these tongs were probably part of the founder’s apparatus. Whether they were used merely as fire-tongs, or for the purpose of lifting the crucible or melting-pot, is a question. They appear, however, much too light to be of service for the latter purpose. In the museum of the Louvre at Paris are some Egyptian tongs of bronze, which are remarkably similar to those from Durham. A workman seated before a small fireplace, holding a blowpipe to his mouth with one hand and with a pair of tongs in the other, is shown in a painting at Thebes, published by Sir Gardner Wilkinson.[662] What I have ventured to regard as another of the tools of the bronze-founder is a kind of pointed punch or pricker, of which an example is given in Fig. 220. This, as well as another which had lost its point, was found, with socketed celts, gouges, moulds, &c., forming the whole stock-in-trade of a bronze-founder, in the Isle of Harty, Kent. It seems to have been furnished with a wooden handle, into which the tang was driven as far as the projecting stop; and its purpose appears to have been the extraction of the cores of burnt clay from out of the sockets of the celts. [Illustration: Fig. 220.—Harty. ½] [Illustration: Fig. 221.—Reach Fen. ½] [Illustration: Fig. 222.—Ebnall. 1/1]