SICKLES are the only undoubtedly agricultural implements in bronze with which we are acquainted in this country. Already in the Stone Period the cultivation of cereals for food appears to have been practised, and I have elsewhere[695] pointed out a form of flint instrument which may possibly have supplied the place of sickles or reaping hooks in those early times. The rarity of bronze sickles in this country, as compared with their abundance in some parts of Southern Europe, is, however, somewhat striking, and may, perhaps, point to a considerably less cultivation of grain crops in Britain than in countries with a warmer climate, while the inhabitants were otherwise in much the same stage of civilisation. The traditions of the use of bronze sickles survived to a comparatively late period in Greece and Italy, and Medea is described by Sophocles[696] as cutting her magic herbs with such instruments (Χαλκέοισιν ἤμα δρεπάνοις τομάς), and by Ovid[697] as doing it “curvamine falcis ahenæ.” Elissa is by Virgil[698] represented as using a bronze sickle for similar purposes— “Falcibus et messæ ad lunam quæruntur aënis Pubentes herbæ nigri cum lacte veneni.” When bronze sickles were used for reaping corn it seems to have been a common custom merely to cut the ears of corn from off the straw, after the manner of the Gaulish reaping machine described by Pliny,[699] and not to cut and carry away straw and ear together from the field. This practice will probably account for the small size of the sickles which have come down to us, unless we are to reverse the argument, and derive the custom of cutting off the ears only from the diminutive size of the instruments employed for reaping. Bronze sickles were hafted in different ways, sometimes being fastened to the handle by a pin, either attached to the stem of the blade or passing through a hole in it, combined with some system of binding; and sometimes being provided with a socket into which the haft was driven, and then secured by a transverse pin or rivet.