In Europe we find reason to believe that the Ligurians of Northwestern Italy were flint-folk of very rude type until they were conquered by the Gauls about 400 B.C.[122] Though the Gauls, Britons, and Germans of the age of Julius Caesar had iron weapons, yet it is evident that the metal was very scarce, and that bronze was more common; and in confirmation of this it is found that in the trenches before Alize, the Alesia of Caesar, where the final struggle of the Roman general with Vercingetorix took place, weapons of stone, bronze, and iron are intermixed. All over the more northern parts of Europe there is the best reason to believe that the use of stone and bronze continued to a much later period, and locally until long after the Christian era. It is clear that such facts as these must greatly modify our ideas of the probable age of the Swiss lake villages, and should induce the greatest caution in claiming any special antiquity for particular classes of implements. One of the most remarkable discoveries of modern times is that of the site of ancient Troy by Dr. Schliemann, and it affords clear and decisive evidence as to the historic value of the ages to which we have referred. Troy was destroyed by the Greeks perhaps about 1300 B.C., and we know from Homer that this was in what for the Greeks and Trojans may properly be termed the copper age, weapons and armor of that metal being in common use, and also the mode of burial by cremation. We may well suppose that at that early date the stone age was still in full force in Northern Europe and Asia, and in the mountains of Switzerland; and as the tin mines of England had not yet been reached, bronze was scarce and dear even in Eastern Europe and Asia. Now Schliemann has disinterred the undoubted Trojan Ilium on the hill of Hissarlik; but he finds it to be only one of several buried cities, and the succession of strata will be most clearly seen in the section on the following page, compiled from his clear and circumstantial descriptions. It is needless to say that this presents a succession of the stone age to one of comparatively high civilization. It also forms an epitome of that of the whole East, and of primitive man in general, in some very important respects. We have first, at a date probably coeval with that of the earliest monarchies of Assyria and Egypt, a primitive people whose arts and mode of life remind us strongly of the American Toltecans and Peruvians.[123] Schliemann supposes them to have been Aryan, but they were more probably of Turanian race. They must have occupied the site for a very long time. They were succeeded by a more cultivated people of fine physical organization, yet possibly still Turanians or primitive Aryans, who by trade or plunder had accumulated large stores of metallic wealth, and had made advances in the arts of life placing them on a level with the early Phoenicians and Egyptians, with whom they probably had intercourse. These