It naturally becomes a question of considerable interest to us,--Are these weapons, of beautiful and varied forms, the product of native genius and skill? or were they brought hither by foreign conquerors, to remain only as the evidences of national inferiority in arts and arms? The question is one which no Briton can deem worthless; albeit we do not esteem ourselves the pure lineal descendants of the Allophylian aborigines, or of the primitive Celtæ, but, on the contrary, are content to derive our peculiar modern national characteristics as the product of mingled races of Picts, Scots, Romans, Tungrians and other barbarian legionary colonists, Norwegians, Danes, Anglo-Saxons, and Normans.[273] Such are indeed the strange and diverse elements which make up the genealogy of the modern Scot. Nevertheless, his nationality is not the less strong because he derives his inheritance from so many sources; nor is his interest lessened in the aboriginal root. A very simple theory has heretofore sufficed for the classification of all Scottish, and, until very recently, of all British antiquities. Whatever was rude and barbarous, such as unhewn standing stones and monolithic circles, stone hammers and axes, and flint arrows, were native and Druidical; whatever manifested skill, invention, or any progress in the arts, was either Phœnician, Roman, or Danish! Britain, it was tacitly assumed, was sunk in the lowest state of barbarism, until humanized by the bloody missionaries of Roman civilisation. Such ignorant assumption will no longer suffice. Mr. Worsaae adopts an era extending over about eleven centuries for the continuation of the Danish bronze period. From geological evidence he arrives at the conclusion, which is not improbable, that bronze weapons and implements were in use fully five centuries before the Christian era. But that the Archaic Period continued so long after it, when the neighbouring countries to the south were long familiar with the common and more useful metal, and when the Norwegians, who, it is acknowledged, appear never to have known a bronze period, were already taking their position among the Scandinavian nations, preparatory to making their piratical descents on the British shores, seems altogether improbable and opposed to established truths.