Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/434

406 the dawn of history in Italy. There is no longer any reason for supposing that the civilised Mediterranean peoples were dependent on the mines of Spain and Britain for a supply of bronze. We have also explained to us one of the causes of the wealth of the Etruskans. Bronze must have been almost as valuable and quite as beautiful as gold, and the most useful material for making implements and weapons before the invention of iron. The commerce, therefore, of the Mediterranean world would inevitably be attracted to Tuscany, and the products of the industries of Egypt, Assyria, and Greece would be received in exchange for the bronze articles for which the Etruskans became so famous. By this discovery tin and copper are proved to occur in the very region where they might reasonably be expected.

It is very probable that the oldest tin mines worked in Europe are those of Tuscany. Then the natural progress of discovery would lead the Phœnicians to the exploration of the tin mines of the Eldorado of the West—the Iberian peninsula. And next, as the adventurous sailors penetrated farther to the north, along the shores of the ocean, the mines of Brittany and Cornwall would be opened up. Those of Saxony and Bohemia and of central France were probably developed, the one by the energy of the Etruskan merchants, and the other by the merchants of Massilia, or of the Phœnician Heraklea; but they may have been worked by the natives before the paths of commerce reached so far north. In France the mines of Villeder were worked in the Bronze age.

None of these districts can lay claim to be the centre in which tin was first worked and bronze was discovered. The origin of bronze, like that of the use of polished stone, has to be looked for in some other region.