I have spoken of this division into Periods as having been first practically adopted by the Danish school of antiquaries, but in fact this classification is by no means so recent as has been commonly supposed. Take, for instance, the communication of Mahudel to the _Académie des Inscriptions_ of Paris[3] in 1734, in which he points out that man existed a long time in different countries using implements of stone and without any knowledge of metals; or again, the following passage from Bishop Lyttelton’s[4] “Observations on Stone Hatchets,” written in 1766:—“There is not the least doubt of these stone instruments having been fabricated in the earliest times, and by barbarous people, before the use of iron or other metals was known, and from the same cause spears and arrows were headed with flint and other hard stones.” A century earlier, Sir William Dugdale, in his “History of Warwickshire,”[5] also speaks of stone celts as “weapons used by the Britons before the art of making arms of brass or iron was known.” We find, in fact, that the same views were entertained, not only by various writers[6] within the last two centuries, but also by many of the early poets and historians. There are even biblical grounds for argument in favour of such a view of a gradual development of material civilization. For all, including those who invest Adam with high moral attributes, must confess that whatever may have been his mental condition, his personal equipment in the way of tools or weapons could have been but inefficient if no artificer was instructed in brass and iron until the days of Tubal Cain, the sixth in descent from Adam’s outcast son, and that too at a time when a generation was reckoned at a hundred years, instead of at thirty, as now. |4| Turning, however, to Greek and Roman authors, we find Hesiod,[7] about B.C. 850, mentioning a time when bronze had not been superseded by iron:— Τοῖς δ᾿ ἧν χάλκεα μὲν τεύχεα, χάλκεοι δέ τε οἷκοι Χαλκῶ δ᾿ εἰργάζοντο, μέλας δ᾿ οὐκ ἓσχε σίδηρος. Lucretius[8] is even more distinct in his views as to the successive Periods:— “Arma antiqua manus, ungues, dentesque fuerunt Et lapides, et item sylvarum fragmina rami— Posterius ferri vis est ærisque reperta; Sed prior æris erat quam ferri cognitus usus— Ære solum terræ tractabant, æreque belli Miscebant fluctus et vulnera vasta ferebant.” So early as the days of Augustus it would appear that bronze arms were regarded as antiquities, and that emperor seems to have commenced the first archæological and geological collection on record, having adorned one of his country residences “rebus vetustate ac raritate notabilibus, qualia sunt Capreis immanium belluarum ferarumque membra prægrandia quæ dicuntur gigantum ossa et arma heroum.”[9]