Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/443

] it is important for our enquiry only because it proves that the civilisation of the Bronze age was not derived from central or southern Russia. The Danubian is further subdivided by M. Chantre into two closely connected provinces, the Scandinavian and the Hungarian. The Scandinavian bronze swords, with metal hilts elaborately adorned with spirals and chevrons, are so closely allied in their style to those of the Hungarian province, that it is very probable that their designs were originally obtained, as well as the metal, from that quarter. The third group consists of the provinces of Greece, Italy, and France and Switzerland. Into the last of these, in M. Chantre's opinion, bronze was introduced from Italy, and not by way of the Danube. The poverty of the British Isles in works of art belonging to the Bronze age renders it very difficult to classify them either with the Danubian or the Mediterranean group, for they are just as likely to have derived their types from France as from the Danube or the Valley of the Rhine. They may be more satisfactorily classified with the former than with the latter, since the knowledge of bronze was introduced, as we have seen in the last chapter, by a Celtic race after the conquest of the neighbouring parts of France. The peculiarities (such for example as the holes on either side of the mid rib of the spear-heads) which lead some writers to look upon Britain as an independent province, seem to me to be the necessary result of the country being fenced off from the Continent by a barrier of sea.