Page:Outlines of European History.djvu/153

 The Mediterranea7i World and the Early Greeks 1 1 5 copper ax or dagger, imitated the metal shapes in stone with brilliant success. So long as he was obliged to depend entirely upon imported metal he was slow to learn the new art of shaping it. At last the knowledge that metal might be found in mountain Europe be- ores reached him, and he sought and found the precious veins copper and^ of metal in his own mountains. In the British Isles the galleries ^^" which the ancient miner pushed into the mountain side, although they have sometimes caved in, still contain the stone pickaxes which he used there ; while in the Austrian Alps we find the remains of his rude equipment for getting out the ore, with even his ore-crushers and smelting furnaces still preserved. The lens-shaped disks of copper which came from these furnaces still show us the form of the raw metal as it went from the smelt- ing furnaces to the craftsman. Such miners also discovered the tin mines of Portugal and of Cornwall in England, and with this they were able to harden copper into bronze (see p. 34), which was common in the Norse countries as early as 2000 b.c.^ Notwithstanding the fact that they now possessed metal, the Failure of peoples of western and northern Europe still failed to advance advance to to a hio^h type of civilization. As we have seen, they learned to ^}^^ civihza- ^ J i:- 1 J tion after build vast structures of rough stone all along the shores of the introduction Atlantic (p. 12 and Fig. 8), like the great stone circles at Stone- henge ; but they were unable to advance to real architecture in 1 For a long time stone and metal were used side by side. In one of the lake-villages of Switzerland, preserved in a peat bog, three successive towns lie one over the other. Stone implements are found in all three, but the upper two, that is the later two, contain also objects of copper along with those of stone Slovv'ly stone gave way before metal, and the ancient art of chipping flint gradu ally disappeared as metal.became more plentiful. ye should remember, however that some races still surviving, like the Bushmen of South Africa and the Aus tralians and Tasmanians (p. 2), continue at the present day in the use of stone and have not yet learned to work metal nor to make metal tools. Indeed, even in Europe certain stone implements lingered on in use among the peasants of the north of Sweden as late as the nineteenth century, nearly four thousand years after metal was introduced in the Norse countries. A vague tradition of the Stone Age survived even into Roman times, although by that time the world at large had forgotten this long chapter in the story of their ancestors, and the stone axes which the peasants picked up now and then in the fields, they fancied Were thunderbolts of the sky god.