Page:Origin of metallic currency and weight standards.djvu/102

 from this discussion is therefore that some people who inhabited Switzerland in what is called the neolithic age (a vague and often misleading phrase) were acquainted with the use of gold ornaments. Could we but fix the inferior limits of this neolithic age, we should at least obtain an approximate date before which gold was already known. But it is most probable that stone, bronze and even iron long continued to be used side by side in the same areas. The man who had no articles to barter for bronze continued to use stone implements of his own manufacture, whilst his more fortunate coeval used weapons made of the superior but more costly material.

Granting now that bronze implements made their way from the Mediterranean into the middle and north of Europe, brought most likely by traders from the more civilized shores of the Aegean, let us ask ourselves how did the men of the neolithic stage obtain them. Did the kindly Phoenician trader generously bestow as free gifts these articles on the barbarians of the West? Does the trader of today among the isles of Melanesia lavish for mere thanks his wares upon the natives who gather round him on the beach? In Homer those Phoenician shipmen are described by an epithet, which by the mildest interpretation means knaves. The men who brought bronze got some valuable objects in exchange for it. Such objects must be portable: slaves, gold, silver, copper, tin, skins and furs would probably form the main objects of barter. If we make use of the philological method of Schrader and his school, there can be no doubt that copper was known to the Italians before ever a Phoenician keel grated against their shores, for the Latin aes is as we said a true Aryan word. There is no suspicion of borrowing here from the Semitic as there is in the case of the Greek chalkos. In such a case as this the philological argument has some distinct force; for whilst, as I argued, it is easy to realize a state of things under which a native name for a particular substance already known may give place to a foreign one, on the other hand it is difficult to see how a people who are receiving such a substance for the first time from foreigners, and who would therefore naturally apply to it a term obtained from the foreigners' language, could