Thus we come to the end of the stone age or ages. The next great discovery which man made was that of the metals. Not iron at first; before iron was discovered there supervened the age known as the Bronze Age, when copper and tin were known but not iron, and all the most important implements were made of that mixture of copper and tin--bronze, the hardest substance then obtainable. In some countries the discovery of the metals was natural, and one age followed upon the other in gradual sequence. But in Europe it was not so. The men of the bronze age were a new race, sallying out of the East to dispossess the older inhabitants, and if in some places the bronze men and the stone men seem to have gone on for a time side by side, the general character of the change is that of a sudden break. Therefore we do not now proceed to speak of the characteristic civilization of the bronze age. As will be seen hereafter, the bringers of the new weapons belonged to a race concerning whom we have much ampler means of information than is possessed for the first inhabitants of these lands; and we are spared the necessity of drawing all our knowledge from a scrutiny of their arms or tombs. But before we can satisfactorily show who were the successors of the stone-age men in Europe, and whence they came, we must turn aside towards another inquiry, viz. into the origin of language. CHAPTER III. THE GROWTH OF LANGUAGE. [Sidenote: The growth of language.] We have looked upon man fashioning the first implements and weapons and houses which were ever made; we now turn aside and ask what were the first of those immaterial instruments, those ‘aëriform, mystic’ legacies which were handed down and gradually improved from the time of the earliest inhabitants of our globe? Foremost among these, long anterior to the ‘metallurgic and other manufacturing _skill_,’ comes language. With us, in whose minds thought and speech are so bound together as to be almost inseparable, the idea that language is an instrument which through long ages has been slowly improved to its present perfection, seems difficult of credit. We think of early man having the same ideas and expressing them as readily as we do now; but this he could not really have done. Not, indeed, that we have any reason to believe that there was a time when man had no language at all; but it seems certain that long ages were necessary before this instrument could be wrought to the fineness in which we find it, and to which, in all the languages with which we are likely to become acquainted, we are accustomed. A rude iron knife or spear-head seems a simple and natural thing to make. But we know that before it could be made iron had to be discovered, and the art of extracting iron from the ore; and, as a matter of fact, we know that thousands of years passed before the iron spear-head was a possibility; thousands of years spent in slowly improving the weapons of