_Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages._--We know that the learned have divided the period man has inhabited the globe into what may roughly be called three Ages--the Stone, the Bronze, and the Iron. Ancient mythology presented us with another, ycleped the Golden, when our planet was supposed to be a paradise, and man lived in a state of perpetual happiness; it is to be feared that the idea of a golden age, either past or to come, is purely mythical. Future archæologists may, perhaps, be tempted to apply the designation “Steel” to the present or now commencing epoch, in order to distinguish it from the mere “Iron Age.” Improved methods of manufacture are now-a-days causing steel in some degree to supersede its parent metal, iron, even as iron superseded bronze. Excavations on the site of crannogs have demonstrated clearly the fact that some of them have had a continuous existence throughout the three ages of Stone, Bronze, and Iron. Classification of the earth’s history into those three ages does not, however, imply a defined and distinctive period when stone, bronze, or iron alone was in exclusive use, though there may possibly have been a time in which only stone and bone were available. When the empires of the Tigris and Nile were in their prime, the northern littoral of Europe was inhabited by a race using implements of bone and stone, but these regions were in the Bronze Age[81] at the period when the Phœnicians had attained the zenith of their power. According to some writers, the inhabitants of the Baltic littoral had not till early in the Christian era discarded bronze and stone for iron. Although weapons of bone or flint were certainly of an earlier age than bronze and iron, yet it is more than probable that flint, bronze, and iron may have been in use at one and the same period, and even in the same locality, down to a period long subsequent to the Christian era. To this day the Esquimaux use bone implements, but they also employ iron, so that in remote countries a stone age might be said still to exist, the few iron implements in possession of the wild tribes being acquired by recent contact with western civilization. In Ireland there is no fixed line of demarcation between the stone, the bronze, and the iron age; there was an overlapping and co-mingling as the better and more useful metal gradually superseded its predecessor. Thus a stone instrument, by itself, would be a most deceptive guide in determining the state of civilization of the inhabitants of the site on which it was discovered, because stone implements are also found associated with articles both of bronze and iron. “Like the three principal colours of the rainbow,” writes Mr. Evans, “these three stages of civilization overlap, intermingle, and shade off, the one into the other; and yet their succession, as far as Western Europe is concerned, appears to be equally well defined with that of the prismatic colours, though the