In Central Europe the pile-dwellings in the lakes of Western Switzerland again present us with specially clear and uninterrupted series of illustrations of the progress of culture from the Stone Age to the Iron Age. Ending the Stone Age, we find first a period of transition, in which, while stone continued to be principally employed, a few ornaments, weapons, and tools of metal began to be used. This metal is at first almost exclusively copper, with only very little bronze; iron is quite absent. Copper objects have been found in Western Switzerland by Victor Gross, most extensively in Fenel’s lake-dwelling station, which otherwise still belongs to the Stone Age. The majority of these are small daggers, formed after the pattern of the flint daggers; some already possess rivetings for fastening the blade to a handle. There are also chisels and small awls in bone handles, beads, and small ornamental leaves, and hatchets of the form of the simplest stone hatchets, with the edge hammered out and broadened. Much has proved the existence of a Copper Period corresponding to this description in the lake-dwelling in the Mond See in Austria, and in Hungary the remains of a Copper Period are particularly frequent. Parallel cases also occur in many other parts of Europe, particularly, as Virchow has proved, in the Spanish Peninsula, and in the Stone Age graves of Cujavia in Prussian Poland. These are the more important as they are most closely related to the conditions of culture discovered in the ancient strata of Hissarlik-Troy. Further unmistakable analogies occur with very ancient finds in Cyprus, and probably even with the oldest remains of Babylonian culture hitherto known. Here, too, we may include the finds of copper in the Stone Age of America. [Sidenote: The Passing of the Stone Age] So that in the normal and complete evolution of culture there seems to be first a stratum of copper as the connecting link between the Stone and Metal Ages; and this must be missing in those regions in which progress from the stone to the metal culture was only brought about at a relatively later period by external influences. This applies not only to all modern races in an age of stone, who obtained metal in recent times only through contact with European nations who had been living in the Iron Period for thousands of years, but, curiously enough, also to the greater part of Africa, where the use of iron was prevalent at a prehistoric period.