Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 35.djvu/807

Rh could not have been used as battle-axes, and were too frail to stand the shaking of being carried ceremonially in processions. It is therefore suggested that they were fixed somewhere as standing ornaments. The art of soldering being unknown, joining or repairing was done by pinning the pieces together or by casting bronze over the joint, often in a very clumsy way. Inlaying was practiced, with amber, or with a dark-brown material like resin, which must have produced an effective contrast with the yellow bronze. The art of gilding was not known, but objects were sometimes overlaid with thin plates of gold.

No traces remain of Bronze-age houses, and no representations of them occur among the rock-carvings. The tools were substantially the same as those known to the Stone age, but were more usually—not always—made of bronze. The most common tool was a kind of axe or chisel, known as a "celt." The celts were originally copies of the stone axes, and were "socketed" and not socketed. The socketed celts had a handle inserted into a socket, and were bound to it by a little loop that was provided in the casting. The non-socketed celts were fixed, like the flint axes, into one end of a cloven haft. "Of sewing implements there have been found especially needles, awls, tweezers, and knives. They are almost always of bronze; but a few tweezers and one awl of gold have been found in Sweden and Denmark." The awls were fixed in a haft, of which specimens made of bronze, bone, and amber are preserved. The needles were used in making woolen clothes, and the other implements for sewing leather or skins. Narrow strips or threads of skin were cut out with the knife, holes were bored with the awl, and the leather thread was drawn through the holes with the tweezers. "These implements are much more frequent than the needles, which partially indicates that clothes of skin were far more generally worn than those of wool during this period." Scissors were unknown.

The specimen of woolen cloth represented in Fig. 4 is part of a piece, five feet long and two feet wide, which was found in a barrow at Dömmestorp, in Holland, in 1869, and of which the larger pieces are preserved in the National Museum. It is now brown, and had a yellow border at the narrow ends. A coffin made of a cloven and hollowed trunk of oak, found in the "Treenhoi" barrow at Havdrup, in Denmark, in 1861, contained the