Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/452

424 material, which was slowly replacing bronze for cutting implements; and in the Homeric legends the heroes are described as fighting with weapons of bronze and of iron. A lump of iron was among the prizes in the games at the celebration of the funeral of Patroklus. In the time of Hesiod, who flourished 400 years before Herodotus, or B.C. 850, it had already superseded bronze among the Greeks, and to him we owe the knowledge that the age of Bronze was as well recognised by his contemporaries as by modern archæologists. Hesiod and Lucretius distinctly point out that, according to the voice of tradition, the use of bronze disappeared before the spread of the more useful metal; it long survived for making helmets, shields, and armour, and has been used for purposes of ornament down to the present day.

There is no reason to suppose that iron was first discovered in Europe. It is more probable that, like bronze, it was discovered in Asia, and that it was derived from the south. It would spread very rapidly from the old centres of Egypt, Assyria, and Phœnicia, over the Mediterranean area; and from Greece and Italy it would penetrate to the north and west by the ordinary channels of commerce. When the natives had once learned the art of reducing it from its ores, they would no longer be dependent upon distant sources of supply for the materials for making implements and weapons, as they were in the Bronze age. Iron ores occur in very nearly every country in Europe, and have been worked in very remote times. The supply of iron in Britain, in