And yet the native copper was ready to hand in a form and in quantity unknown elsewhere. No such supplies of the pure metal invited the industry of the first Asiatic or European metallurgists. The Cassiterides yielded in abundance the ores of copper and tin, but these had to be smelted and worked with all the accumulated results of tentative skill before they yielded the copper or more useful bronze. By whom or where this first knowledge was mastered is unknown: the tendency is still to look to Asia, perhaps to Phœnicia, or to the still undetermined cradle of the Aryans, wherever that may prove to have been, for the birth of this phase of metallurgic art which constituted so important a stage in early civilisation. Yet if the ancient American missed it, it was not for want of opportunity. Examples of the accidental fusion of copper by the sacrificial fires of the Mound-Builders repeatedly occur in the mounds of the Ohio valley. But no gifted native alchymist was prompt to read the lesson and turn it to practical account. Asia and Europe appear to have passed by a natural transition, step by step, from their rudest stages of lithic art to polished stone, and then to implements of metal. Some of the steps were doubtless very slow. Worsaae believed that the use of bronze prevailed in Denmark “five or six hundred years before the birth of Christ.”[76] In Egypt it undoubtedly was known at a greatly earlier date. I still incline to my early formed opinion, that gold was the first metal worked. Found in nuggets, it could scarcely fail to attract attention. It was easy to fashion into shape; and some of the small, highly polished stone hammers seem fitter for this than any other work.[77] The abundant gold ornaments of the New World at the time of the discovery of Mexico and Peru accord with this idea. The like attraction of the bright native copper, is proved by its employment among the southern Indians for personal ornaments; and in this way the economic use of the metals may have been first suggested. From the working of gold nuggets, or of virgin copper, with the hammer, to the smelting of the ores, was no trifling step; but that knowledge once gained, the threshold of civilisation and true progress had been reached. The history of the grand achievement is embodied in the earliest myths both of the Old and the New World. Tubal-cain, Dædalus, Hephæstus, Vulcan, Vœlund, Galant, the Luno or the Celtic Fingal, and Wayland, the Saxon smith-god, are but legendary variations of the first worker by whom the gift of metallurgy was communicated to man; and so too the New World has its Quetzalcoatl, or Vœlund of the Aztecs, the divine instructor of their ancestors in the use of the metals. But whatever be the date of this wise instructor, no share of the knowledge communicated by him to that favoured race appears to have ever penetrated northward of the Mexican Gulf.