Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 38.djvu/525

Rh the other hand, the northern Eurasiatics had got as far as copper, by the help of their own ingenuity, why deny them the capacity to make the further step to bronze? Carry back the borrowing system as far as we may, in the end we must needs come to some man or men from whom the novel idea started, and who after many trials and errors gave it practical shape. And there really is no ground in the nature of things for supposing that such men of practical genius may not have turned up, independently in more races than one.

The capacity of the population of Europe for independent progress while in the copper and early bronze stage—the "palæometallic" stage, as it might be called—appears to me to be demonstrated in a remarkable manner by the remains of their architecture. From the crannog to the elaborate pile-dwelling, and from the rudest inclosure to the complex fortification of the terramare, there is an advance which is obviously a native product. So with the sepulchral constructions; the stone cist, with or without a preservative or memorial cairn, grows into the chambered graves lodged in tumuli; into such megalithic edifices as the dromic vaults of Maes How and New Grange; to culminate in the finished masonry of the tombs of Mycenæ, constructed on exactly the same plan. Can any one look at the varied series of forms which lie between the primitive five or six flat stones fitted together into a mere box, and such a building as Maes How, and yet imagine that the latter is the result of foreign tuition? But the men who built Maes How, without metal tools, could certainly have built the so-called "treasure-house" of Mycenæ with them.

If these old men of the sea, the heights of Hindoo-Koosh-Pamir and the plain of Shinar, had been less firmly seated upon the shoulders of anthropologists, I think they would long since have seen that it is at least possible that the early civilization of Europe is of indigenous growth; and that, so far as the evidence at present accumulated goes, the neolithic culture may have attained its full development, copper may have gradually come into use, and bronze may have succeeded copper, without foreign intervention.

So far as I am aware, every raw material employed in Europe up to the palæo-metallic stage is to be found within the limits of Europe; and there is no proof that the old races of domesticated animals and plants could not have been developed within these limits. If any one chose to maintain that the use of bronze in Europe originated among the inhabitants of Etruria and radiated thence along the already established lines of traffic to all parts of Europe, I do not see that his contention could be upset. It would be hard to prove either that the primitive Etruscans could not have discovered the way to manufacture bronze, or that they did not discover it and become a great mercantile people in