Granting now that bronze implements made their way from the Mediterranean into the middle and north of Europe, brought most likely by traders from the more civilized shores of the Aegean, let us ask ourselves how did the men of the neolithic stage obtain them. Did the kindly Phoenician trader generously bestow as free gifts these articles on the barbarians of the West? Does the trader of today among the isles of Melanesia lavish for mere thanks his wares upon the natives who gather round him on the beach? In Homer those Phoenician shipmen are described by an epithet, which by the mildest interpretation means _knaves_. The men who brought bronze got some valuable objects in exchange for it. Such objects must be portable: slaves, gold, silver, copper, tin, skins and furs would probably form the main objects of barter. If we make use of the philological method of Schrader and his school, there can be no doubt that copper was known to the Italians before ever a Phoenician keel grated against their shores, for the Latin _aes_ is as we said a true Aryan word. There is no suspicion of borrowing here from the Semitic as there is in the case of the Greek _chalkos_. In such a case as this the philological argument has some distinct force; for whilst, as I argued, it is easy to realize a state of things under which a native name for a particular substance already known may give place to a foreign one, on the other hand it is difficult to see how a people who are receiving such a substance for the first time from foreigners, and who would therefore naturally apply to it a term obtained from the foreigners’ language, could afterwards replace this name by one which is found applied to the same substance by a cognate people dwelling thousands of miles away from them. The Italians therefore probably had copper from a very early age. But we have already seen good reason for believing that a knowledge of gold precedes that of copper whenever both are found in the same area. We saw that the Scythians, who got copious store of gold from the Ural-Altai region, made no use of copper in the fifth century before our era, although copper is found abundantly in the same area. From this we may infer with some probability that the Italian stock were acquainted with gold sooner than with copper. We may apply the same argument to gold in Italy as we did to _copper_. _Aurum_ (older _ausum_), the Latin word for gold, is plainly not borrowed, as is perhaps the Greek _chrysos_, from the Semites. Hence it cannot be maintained that it was only with the Phoenicians that the knowledge of gold reached Italy.