(2) After allowing full play for Asian and Egyptian influences, the fact abides that there was a well-developed native Mycenæan art. The decoration of the pottery is non-Oriental and non-Egyptian; the seaweeds and marine creatures depicted are home-products of the island world of Greece; and where sacred trees and pillars appear, we have no Semitic element, but the outcome, as Mr. Evans puts it, of a "religious stage widely represented on primitive European soil, and nowhere more persistent than in the West." But if there were stepping-stones between Argolis and Syria in the islands that lay between, there was continuous passage on the western side, making Mycenæ a link between East and West. The breaks formerly assumed between the Old and the New Stone Ages of prehistoric Europe have been filled up by the accumulation of evidence as to man's continuous tenure of that continent since his primitive ancestors crossed thither by now vanished land-routes from Northern Africa. In like manner the _Mirage Orientale_, as M. Salomon Reinach happily terms it, of a metal-introducing people from the East, who, in successive racial waves, swept the older settlers before them into the remotest corners of the north-west, has vanished. When once peopled, Europe, like Asia and America, ran on independent lines of development, which, however, were not isolated from connecting lines approaching from the East. The striking facts of the use of common trade-signs along both shores of the Mediterranean, and of the existence of remains of Mycenæan monuments in Sardinia, are in keeping with other facts, showing how close was the contact between one part of Europe and another centuries before the Phœnicians had left the shores of the Persian Gulf for the Syrian seaboard. They prepare us for acceptance of the new theory of "an Ægean culture rising in the midst of a vast province extending from Switzerland and Northern Italy through the Danubian basin and the Balkan peninsula, and continued through a large part of Anatolia, till it finally reaches Cyprus." (Evans, Address Brit. Assoc.; _Nature_, 1st Oct. 1896, p. 529.) They prepare us for the fact that in the Bronze Age, if Scandinavia and its borderlands were the source of amber, the supply of gold for Northern and Central Europe was drawn not from the Ural, but from Ireland.