proportions of the spectrum may vary in different countries.” Petrie, the well-known Irish antiquary, was the first to claim for a large class of iron remains the position of an interesting connecting link, which they are now allowed to hold, between the bronze manufacture of a remote age and the industrial achievements of comparatively modern days. At the period of the first discovery of the remains of Irish lake dwellings, archæologists looked upon objects of iron found in lakes, or in their immediate vicinity, with very little interest, for it was considered that they could not have held out against the corroding influence of water for a lengthened period; therefore iron was supposed to stamp lacustrine habitations with a mediæval or even modern impress. The belief was then very general that the inhabitants of Erin of the prehistoric period, having existed generation after generation as manufacturers of flint and stone weapons, had gradually, through some unknown channel, become acquainted with gold, silver, and bronze, and that this latter metal, down even to the advent of St. Patrick, was used almost exclusively in the manufacture of weapons of war, small ornaments for personal adornment, and objects of domestic use. Articles of stone, bone, wood, bronze, and iron have been discovered in strange medley: swords, spear and javelin heads, axes, daggers, knives, hones, querns, shears, tweezers, chains, combs, pins, brooches, beads, horse trappings, cauldrons of hammered bronze, lumps of iron slag, &c.--in short, every conceivable object, from the rudest flint implement to highly-finished silver ornaments. The accidental discovery of the great historical crannog of Lagore, in the county Meath, already referred to, presents the first, and probably the most important, treasure-trove of earliest iron implements. In A.D. 848 an Irish chief, with his Danish allies, plundered this island fortress and burnt it; whilst in 933, nearly a century later, the place again suffered a similar fate at the hands of another marauder. Nothing more was heard of it till the date of its disinterment, about the year 1840. The latest period, therefore, to which the majority of the antiquities so plentifully found within and around this stronghold may be referred, is somewhere between the eleventh and earliest half of the tenth century. This approximate date is about the historic limit in which the so-called “Iron Age” may be allowed to have reached back in Ireland. How long it had previously existed there must be matter of conjecture; but it is almost incredible that its natives should have been far behind their neighbours in the art of metallurgy; and we know that Cæsar[82] found the Britons acquainted with the use of iron. It can only be surmised that, at some very remote period, bronze as the prevailing material gave way to iron, but the period of transition may probably be counted by centuries.[83]