One of the ores which occurs in the greatest number of places[188] and in the largest quantities; having a specific gravity ranging from 8·830 to 8·958; harder and more elastic than silver; the most tenacious of metals after iron and platinum; malleable when cold as well as when hot, so as not to require the furnace; melting at a temperature between the fusion points of silver and gold (1196° F.); and readily cast in sand-beds and moulds, Copper must have been used in the earliest ages, and has continued to our day, when the art of smelting it—at Swansea, for instance, in South Wales—is perhaps more advanced than that of any other ore. When the stone-and-bone weaponed peoples began their rude metallurgy, they would retain, with similar habits of thought, the same principles of design. The old Celtis, Celt, or chisel of serpentine or silex, would be copied in the newly-introduced and gradually-adopted weapon-tool of metal; and the transition would be so gradual that we trace without difficulty the process of development. The first metal blade was probably a dagger of copper, preserving the older shape of wood, horn, and stone: possibly it resembled the copper knife found at Memphis in 1851 by Hekekyan Bey; and this afterwards would grow to a Sword. Wood, stone, copper, and bronze, iron and steel, must long have been used simultaneously, slowly making way for one another, as the musket took the place of the matchlock, the rifle of the musket. According to Pliny (vii. 57), ‘Aristotle supposes that Scythes, the Lydian, was the first to fuse and temper copper; while Theophrastus,[189] in Aristotle’s day, ascribes the art to Delas, the Phrygian. Some give the origin to the Chalybes, others to the Cyclopes.’ Achilles, the pupil of Chiron (ibid. v. 20), is represented in pictures as scraping the _ærugo_[190] or verdigris off a spear into the wound of Telephus, the effect of which diacetate would soon be followed by the discovery of blue-stone (sulphate of copper, blue copperas) or blue vitriol, still a favourite in the East. Pausanias (‘Æliaca’) further informs us that Spanish copper, or copper from Tartessus, was the first used. The classics agree that Cadmus (not ‘the foreigner,’ but the ‘old man,’ _El-Kadim_, or the ‘Eastern man,’ _El-Kadmi_) introduced metallurgy into Greece. [Heading: _EGYPTIAN COPPER MINES._]